


Until that night

by Rollina



Category: Thor (Comics), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Asgard, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Jotunheim, Jötunn Loki, Loki Angst, Loki Feels, M/M, Male Slash, One True Pairing, Out of Character, Points of View, Protective Thor, Slash, Thor Angst, Thor Feels, Thorki - Freeform, Thunderfrost - Freeform, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2013-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-22 12:30:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 55,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/609847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rollina/pseuds/Rollina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They knew each other more deeply and since longer than anyone else, they shared life, joy, pain, battles, victory and defeat since they were children, bound together no matter what. So, everything happened just as if it was meant to happen; yet, things may not be so easy when two gods decide they'd just wish to live on their... love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Until that night (Prologue)

**Author's Note:**

> Just a few words on this work that since many months already is literally consuming me - in a way that couldn't be more positive, obviously.  
>  It started as one-shot, because I badly needed to fix on "paper" how I saw them revealing their love to each other and making love; one-shot that later became Chapter 1, and that's still evolving towards an end already drawn clearly in my head.  
>  First of all, I don't like alternate universes at all, so my Thor and Loki live their story strictly on Asgard and the Nine Realms, and you will not even find any mention of any Avengers stuff.  
>  My Loki is not the "usual" Loki, or better still, he's no more the mischievous trickster we see almost everywhere in the fandom, as he's no more fighting his troubled feelings towards his "brother"; my Loki has made up his mind and freed his heart - as has my Thor. So, he loves Thor and Thor loves him, unconditionally and no matter what; when they fight the enemies that fate puts on their path to their exclusive and unique heaven, they fight together, and they fight for a brand new cause and for that only: their love. That's why I'm more interested in putting into words their mutual feelings and their erotic interaction, than in anything else.  
>  Maybe there's no better explanation for my intentions than the words I put in Thor's mouth in Chapter 5 (perhaps the chapter I love the most, so far):  
>  "...For there’s only one thing that now I can think to care about: I want to see him happy, and painless, and peaceful, and totally gratified just because of our love. As he would be, if he just could. And as would I. We spent millennia fighting, together, against each other, and killing enemies, and leading wars for other people’s sake. Now I only wish we both could live just on our love. I know he wishes the same. Is that too a petty thing to ask, for two like us who were born gods?"
> 
> The sequel to **"Until that night"** \-- > [**"A new beginning"**](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1127598)
> 
> \---  
>  P.S.: because several times my digital art (I'm a fractal artist as well) has been stolen and I couldn't help it in any way, this time **I registered this story under my copyright at the accountable Italian authority**. Not because I think it's a masterpiece, or because I'm having mania of grandeur, but just because I'm consuming my life and mind and heart in writing it, and I love it so much that it hurts. **So please don't steal it.** ;)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor needs to find the “right words” to calm down a very angered and jealous Loki, finally making his intentions clear.

“Stay away from me!”, Loki yelled, freeing himself from his brother’s grasp. Even in that dim room, Thor could see the tears on his face, and he could almost skim his rage through the twinkle in his eyes. Again, he grabbed his arms roughly, scrolled him, held him back.  
“Loki!”, he roared. “Calm down and listen to me!”  
No way.  
“Let go of me!” Unable to wriggle out of his grab, Loki screamed almost directly on his face. “Go get your fucking Midgardian and leave me alone!”  
Thor pushed him against the wall, pinned him fiercely, yet trying not to hurt him, both panting heavily. Eyes fixed in each other’s eyes, as if they were ready to kill one another.  
“Loki, listen to me!”, Thor screamed, grabbing his neck, a few inches from his mouth. He couldn’t but look at his little brother’s tears, merged with fire in his deep green eyes. That wasn’t just anger, or madness, Thor was aware of it, as it wasn’t just about a girl from Midgard; that was a dreadful shattering pain tearing that little lost soul apart since ages. Loki couldn’t go anywhere and Thor held him tight, waiting for him to loosen up just a little. Then, he suddenly softened his voice.  
“Loki.”  
Softer, his hand on his neck.  
“Listen.”  
His thumb on his cheek, wiping his tears away, gently. _“Gently” is not exactly what you can expect from Thor every day_ , Loki thought in a blink of astonishment.  
“To me.”  
So close, now. So close. That skin, under Thor’s fingers. So cold, pale, and smooth. So smooth.  
“Loki.”  
That body. That thin and nervous body he knew so well since they were children. That body so tempting and yet so precluded he never even thought to touch in such a way until that night. _You’re my brother_ , he thought. _But actually, you are not_.  
“I don’t want her.”  
Loki’s breathe got deeper while he stared at his brother’s eyes, almost stunned. Angst was now turning into some foggy confusion mingled with unexpected hope, and trembling unbelief, and burning desire. He swallowed his tears and forced his voice out in a low whisper.  
“You… don’t…?”  
Thor’s body leaned softly on him, and it was like being wrapped in a cloak of cosmic protection. So… _weird_. And yet, so… _reassuring_. Loki frowned, astonished, when he realized Thor was aroused, and he couldn’t help letting his own body follow his brother’s. Thor’s smile, so close to his lips, at once was the most sincere and warmest thing he had ever seen in his life.  
“No.”, Thor said smoothly, scrolling his head, and laid a bunch of soft kisses on his brother’s neck, and cheeks, and eyes, and forehead, and lips, delighted in feeling him shivering under his mouth. He stopped just for a moment. “I never did.”

Thor couldn’t wait any longer and pushed his tongue deeply in Loki’s mouth, pulling him closer to the wall, while he felt his brother indulging in that kiss and starting to search roughly between his legs. Things were so fast and unpredicted that surprise and arousal grew together in Loki, and a thousand unthinkable questions flooded his bleary mind along with the fever of excitement. But in the right moment Thor slipped his brother’s robe down, revealing his body, and saw his white chest and grazed his shoulders and – a bit awkward at first – ran his lips on his skin, slowly, from his throat to his navel, more and more confident at each Loki’s shiver, everything was suddenly crystal plain to them both and happened just as if it was meant to happen, as if it had been written in some celestial book way before they were born. They knew each other more deeply and since longer than anyone else, they shared life, joy, pain, battles, victory and defeat since they were children, bound together no matter where “madness” had driven Loki in the last times; now, unveiling and exploring each other’s bodies for the first time was the last tile to complete the amazing jigsaw of their relationship, framing it in the unforeseen flavour of ultimate flawlessness.  
Then everything went wild, breathtaking and somehow confused, the whole room became their erotic battlefield. Thor made his brother come to climax first with just one of his fingers, and he just waited for him to spill out in his hands, delighted in feeling him unwinding in such a… _defenceless_ way he almost got touched; then with his hand, then with his mouth, then with his manhood, and he himself reached orgasm each time together with him, on his stomach, in his hands, in his mouth, just at the thought his little brother was about to come. Loki let a small shout out just the first time Thor broke into him with his… remarkable wand, then it was just like he was used to get it since ever; he knew the secrets of sex already, maybe even more than his brother, but anything was or could have ever been nowhere near to the sex he was now having with Thor. They merged gazes and sweat, smiles and sighs and voices moaning each other’s name, they got to the top so many times they lost count, with no need to take rest in the meantime, and that all was so new, and unique, and so overwhelming, and out of control, and fulfilling way beyond any possible imagination… it almost looked like Loki had put a spell on that room and on them so that their having pleasure could last as long as he wished, or even forever. _Maybe he actually did_ , Thor must have thought at some point. They ended on the huge bed that dominated the room, one grabbed to the other, sweat-soaked, both still burning of desire and yet looking for a blink of clearness in the mess that war of senses unleashed out and inside them.  
Loki’s head laid on Thor’s chest, his thin fingers playing with his brother’s nipples, their legs twisted together, their skin and sweat and smell and semen melted in one. When Loki started talking, his voice kind of came out from some misty in-between lost dimension and perched weightless on Thor’s neck, like a feather just behind his ear.  
“Remember that damn day, when you were supposed to become king of Asgard?” He closed his eyes under the touch of Thor’s fingers running softly on his spine. “When I told you… never to doubt that I love you?” His hand was petting Thor’s manhood with tender nonchalance, like a little girl’s one caressing her favourite doll. “I meant it, Thor.”  
 _Don’t stop_ , Loki thought, as Thor’s finger started searching him again, so slightly now, down there where he was still wet. _Just… don’t stop. Ever_.  
“I know.” Thor felt him tightening in his arms, almost… _helplessy_. That was enough to make his mind hazy again, and his desire reburning. “And I should have kissed you then.”  
 _I’ll make you come in my hands until the end of time_ , Thor though, and slid another finger in. It was so good feeling Loki wrapping all around his fingers, he was so warm inside, and made Thor feel like his little brother was completely in his mercy.  
“I blame myself for ruining your day,” Loki whispered, and when Thor shut his mouth with a deep kiss he tried to resist for an instant, raised his head and talked right on his brother’s lips, almost touching them. “You listen to me, now. I blame myself for ruining our lives. But yet, I couldn’t be able to avoid it. I’ll never be able to avoid what my… nature sometimes forces me to do.”  
 _I don’t mean to mislead you, I never meant, but I did, and eventually… I know I’ll do it again. And that day my… heart will be dead_.  
Thor was still smiling at him, unaware of his thoughts, and they stared at each others, while Thor’s other hand slowly reached Loki between his legs. _I so do love feeling you hardening_.  
“I don’t care.” Thor said, as if that was the most obvious and natural thing ever. “You are what you are, little one, and I’m just fine with that. Because now I know, in that darkness you carry inside there’s a small light, and now we can try and make that small light grow. Together.” And again he smiled, that gorgeous, genuine smile that could tear any possible doubt apart forever. “Come here.”  
Thor made him rise on his knees to pull him closer to his face, keeping his fingers in him, and sank his nose in Loki’s groin, relishing with his skilful tongue every smallest corner of skin all around his brother’s nuts.  
“You smell so good.” _And I want to drink from you again_. On Loki’s new moans he took him in his mouth, tasting his brother’s erection getting harder on his tongue, while his fingers kept seeking him deeply inside. _Slower, my king, slower_ , Loki begged, grasped his hair in his hands and arched his back, but when he felt Thor’s throat brushing his glans he couldn’t but spill himself out in Thor’s mouth, extinguishing that new thrill of pleasure in a long, hushed wet groan. Thor subtly slipped his lips off and his fingers out, drove him down on his thighs and before swallowing the last drop of that rare juice he filled Loki’s mouth up with a long, intense, thorough kiss that lasted for ages.  
“This is… how delicious you taste,” Thor said at the end, holding his head. “Oh, Loki. Please, trust me. We’ll try.”  
 _You don’t understand_ , Loki thought, puzzled in savouring his own flavour right on his tongue, and pleasantly distracted by Thor’s erection between his legs. _You can’t understand. But yes, now I just want to trust you_. Like a cat on heat he rubbed himself wiggly against his brother’s shaft, closed his eyes and cleared his mind to forget everything else.  
“It won’t be so easy.”  
 _And I just want you to take me. Again_.  
“Doesn’t matter. Maybe we make it, maybe we don’t, nothing…” Thor pushed himself inside him again, again making him groan and shiver all along his slender, wonderful body. “…nothing’s going to change my feelings.”  
Loki grabbed his brother’s shoulders, following him up and down, slowly. _I want this to last till forever_. It was so oddly appealing to talk without giving a break to their bodies. Maybe that also was something about being gods.  
“You know, Thor… what I am… sometimes scares me to death.” At once, all around in the room, the air was imbued with the scent of revelation. “I never told anyone. Never.”  
 _Not anymore, little one_ , Thor thought, almost overwhelmed by that rush of sincerity, _not anymore_.  
“Let me tell you something too, then. And please… don’t laugh at me now.” He gulped down hesitation. “Well, it… it was so hard for me, along all these years… it was so hard for me to deal with your… beauty.” Loki’s eyes freezed in his brother’s, curious and surprised, he smiled, and sighed softly, because Thor didn’t stop pushing gently inside him while he was talking. “You’re so beautiful, Loki.” _And how’s that we didn’t take pleasure from each other till now? How stupid of us_. “Not just for this… lovely face of yours, not just for this… damn hot body you have.” Thor couldn’t hold a moan when he felt Loki clenching as if he wanted to keep him inside himself forever. Stopping for a while on that feeling, as Thor touched his lips with his hand Loki wrapped his fingers in his mouth, his tongue stroking them gently. “Your beauty… is made of the darkness you carry in your soul too.” Suddenly, tears merged with blurred delight in Loki’s eyes while he was hanging on Thor’s stunning words, for he’d never expected his brother to talk in that fashion, and he knew how hard it had to be for him. “It’s made of… the pain I perfectly know you suffer when you fight that darkness… and you don’t make it.” Again, Thor pushed slowly, his hands on Loki’s hips, holding him tight and yet carefully, as if he had to handle the most precious and delicate porcelain artifact. “That fight…” He waited for an instant on his brother’s moan, gripping his body and enjoying every single little shake of pleasure he felt flowing across it. “…that huge fight, so huge for such… a frail creature, and yet…” Loki grabbed his hand when he felt him seeking so deeply, swallowed a scream, _not yet_ , he begged himself, letting some little tears run down on his cheeks and on Thor’s words and chest, _not yet_. Thor widened his brother’s legs to reach him even more deeply, he gasped, clutched Loki’s loins driving him on his own manhood, trembled his voice out on his dripping skin. “…and yet carried on inside here…” His lips on his chest, his tongue on his nipples. “…makes you the most beautiful thing…” His hand on his shivering groin, grabbing his shaft. “…I could ever be able to think of.”  
Loki grasped him, frantically, as he felt they were both coming to climax again, _together_ , he bid, _oh yes, please, again, again, together_. He pressed his cheek against his brother’s, dipping his hair with his sweat and tears, calling his name a thousand times. And there he stayed, panting, stuck to his own semen on his brother’s belly, Thor still inside him, still delightfully hardened. Thor gasped on his hair for a while, then took his head in his hands just to be able to watch him in his huge watery eyes.  
“Trust me, Loki,” he said, and again laid a kiss on his lips. “You really _are_ that kind of beautiful. And it really was hard for me to deal with your beauty.”  
Speechless, astonished, Loki just smiled and held back a sob, his body still locked to his brother’s, no words were actually needed, just that clear and fulfilling sensation of pure, unending perfection in which it didn’t even look so unnatural for Evil not to exist.  
“I mean, look at me,” Thor went, giggling on his mouth. “I’m big, I’m strong, I smash, I kill, I fight and defeat enemies all the time, and that’s easy for me… because it’s all here, real, touchable.” He couldn’t help following his renewing arousal, he wasn’t even a little bit tired, _oh you little bastard, you definitely put a spell on us!_ , and took a deep breath of gloat before pulling himself out, carefully, _the most delightful spell ever_ , to have a bit of rest just to focus on the words he was going to say. “But when I think of the kind of struggle you have to fight every second of your life, well…” Trapped in his little brother’s gaze, he drew his profile with his forefinger, from his hairline to his chin, lighlty. “I realize I’m not the strong one, here. You are. And that’s just… disarming.”  
Loki nestled him in a desperate hug, “Oh, just shut up!”, catched his mouth in a passionate rough kiss, _you cuddly big oaf, you’re not such an oaf in the end_ , and dragged him in a roll on their sweat drenched bed, _it’s with you where I belong_ , making him laugh and laughing with him, _now I know_ , light-hearted as he had never ever been, not even when he was a child, _no-one else, nowhere else_. On the excitement that never abandoned them both even for a little while, Thor couldn’t hold his “suspects” back any longer. “Tell me the truth, Loki, you put a spell on us!” Laughing, and kissing. Fulsome innocent face. “No, I didn’t.” More laughing, more kissing. “Yes you did!” More laughing, even more kissing. Soapy puppy eyes. “I swear I didn’t!” It was _fun_. “You liar!” They were both curling up with laughter, now faking a fight in their bed, and it was such _fun_. “Next time I’m using Mjolnir on you instead of my own magic wand!” Loki tried to block Thor’s hands pestering him, uselessly. _We’re laughing, and kidding, and playing like children, naked, in a bed. Surreal_. “Ooh, the _mighty_ Thor! Won’t be such a difference!” Nothing had ever been such simple, freeing and absolute _fun_ in Loki’s whole life and, in all that fun, suddenly hatred, and rage, and darkness, and Asgard, and Jotunheim, and the All-Father… everything was just like… _gone_. No matter if it wouldn’t have lasted beyond that night. Loki just laid down on the idea that maybe – as Thor said a while before – it would, instead.  
When Thor re-emerged from that laugh’n’kisses party, his voice was just a hoarse grunt of enjoyment.  
“So… you’ve got nothing to say but lying on your magics and laughing at me, then?”  
“At this right moment…” Loki answered, sticking his elbows on his chest and laying a teasing wink his face “…I’m just willing to die of having sex with you.”  
Thor smirked at him.  
“In that case, little one… I’m ready to kill you.”


	2. A song from nowhere

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki should have seen that coming.

When Thor woke up, the huge boulder weighing directly on his head made him feel as he had been asleep since centuries after the worst bender in his life. Eyes still closed, he stretched his arm at his side, smelling his brother's scent.   
Loki wasn't there.   
Clumsily, Thor sat up with a grunt, scratched his head and scrolled it, trying to drive that annoying ache away. _Too much sex tonight_ , he thought. _Again_. And chuckled to himself.  
He blinked, his sight dim, trying to focus on the side of the bed where his little brother fell asleep in his arms a few hours earlier. Or well, maybe more than a few.  
But Loki wasn't there.  
"Loki?" As he put his feet down on the floor and stood up, the room kind of turned upside down, he staggered and almost lost his balance. "What the…" Regaining self-mastery, he took a wide look all around in the room. "Loki, are you there?"  
No answer.  
Thor stretched his body, a bit puzzled, a lot more hungry, then his eyes fell on the pool room's door left ajar. He giggled.  
"Don't you dare having a bath without asking me to join! Loki?"  
No answer.   
He jumped through the door, the biggest smile ever on his face.  
"…Loki?"  
His smile vanished.  
Loki. Wasn't. There.

_A few hours earlier. Or maybe more than a few. Days, perhaps.  
Time just went blurry when the deep, warm night on Asgard caught them both and walked them gently into sleep, locked together in the most peaceful and fulfilled embrace.   
Quite oddly, a while before falling asleep Loki found himself thinking of how their bond had grown unique, exclusive and invaluable day by day since the first night. Something he never ever had a taste of in his whole life, something so outstanding and gratifying and at the same time so instinctive that he often couldn't help being astonished. Something so new and unexpected that, almost without realizing it, he started believing things could actually change for him, eventually. Thor made him forget his _old _self, and think of himself as someone… different, someone…_ sincerely good _. Maybe even discover his true self was actually that, and not the Master of Tricks, not the God of Mischief.  
That wasn't just… _love _, at least not in the same acceptation that tiny mortal creatures were used to; that was so much more, unspeakable, blended with magic and deity… it savoured unworldly. And yet it was so uniquely…_ intimate _. He and Thor really didn't need anyone else now, now they really were simply enough to each other, as they became fatally addicted to each other, and the way they now perfectly, purely knew that was amazing.  
It came spontaneous sharing feelings, thoughts, concern and laughs, and surprisingly enough Loki didn't feel so often the urge to cover up the deepest issues, and even less to lie on them; in fact, things were weirdly turning the other way around.  
They had a few secret places elected all over Asgard, where they got used to hide, to talk and cuddle for hours, to play childish games, to have fun practicing their skills, or just to lay down silently, looking at the stars; and at the end, every time, to make love until they were consumed. Had it just been possible, they'd never stopped having sex even for a minute, every hour in every day of every week. Being close, or even being in the same room just smirking at each other was enough to turn them up, anytime, anywhere, no matter who was around. If there was a template of ultimate perfection in making love in the Nine Realms and further, that was theirs and theirs only; they were redefining from scratch the meaning and borders of _desire _and_ fulfilment _, in a way no-one – not even the two of them – could put into words. A way that laid just… beyond. And that was Loki's last though that night, while closing his eyes on Thor's cheek._

Thor grabbed Mjolnir and rushed out of the room, while a sort of shady sensation started spreading under his skin, preventing him from thinking clearly. They came to learn – he and Loki – to perceive each other's presence even when they weren't in the same place, a sort of inner and superior bond linked to Loki's uncanny skills – at least that was Thor's explanation for such a remarkable thing. Now, no matter how hard he tried to concentrate, he couldn't feel anything. He walked faster, and almost didn't see someone coming across and speaking to him along the wide corridor – Fandral, maybe? -: "Hey buddy, at last! Bet you had some very pleasant days locked up in that room, didn't you? We were wondering if you both would ever get out!"  
Thor went on with no answer, dazed, _days? What are you talking about, what do you mean, days?_  
Unable to manage the nagging feeling growing inside him, he searched every corner in the palace and every hideaway of theirs on Asgard, yet knowing in advance he wouldn't find him.

_A few hours earlier. Or maybe more than a few. Days, perhaps. Days.  
But still that night.  
Loki woke up all of a sudden, eyes wide opened, as the almost forgotten sensation of a devastating chill shook his body deeply into his bones.   
He shuddered, instinctively focusing his mind on gathering all of his powers.  
And he smelled them.  
"…No."  
A leaden, unnatural darkness bore heavily on the room, catching him in an invisible grip, his breath got faster and his heart exploded in a silent outburst of rage, as he saw his own nails starting to turn darker and the skin on his fingers, his hands, his arms slowly change colour into a more and more intense shade of blue.  
"No!"  
At his side, Thor was still snoring, unmoving, unaware. He was just nearby, skin to skin, and yet Loki had the hunch he was parted from his own dimension by an unseen, impervious barrier.  
And then he felt them.  
Before the enormous shapes began to take form right at the foot of the bed, cloaked in a frosty mist, he felt them, and realized they had casted on everything in that room the most powerful spell he could ever imagine.  
There were four of them. And their leader – he recognized him at once, Ymir, the mightiest of all sorcerers on Jotunheim – sneered at him, penetrating his soul with his frozen red eyes.  
"Son of Laufey," Ymir chuckled. "Finally, your time has come."  
As he tried teleporting, Loki suddenly felt a violent hit of energy running through his whole body, tearing all his strength out in a second and banging him roughly from his bed against the wall.   
He tried to get his magic spear from the corner he threw it over weeks before.  
He tried to move against them the first objects he could think of.  
He tried to regain his mental powers to block them.  
No way.  
He realized he couldn't even speak anymore. His sight was growing dim. Everything around was getting darker. And darker. And darker.  
And at that point, such an unusual, almost unknown feeling to him, Loki was… _scared _.  
In Ymir's huge hand, a small sphere of light was now pulsating faintly. Loki could still see it, and he understood instantly: as instantly as the porcelain castles he was by then so used to dream of fell all apart in ruins.  
"Your dull tricks will not work against the power of Jotunheim," Ymir snarled on his breathlessness.  
In a livid, frozen air Loki glanced at Thor while the shadows were falling darker all around, _oh please, wake up, please, I need you _, but Thor wasn't moving, caught in that incantation, looking like he was peacefully lost in the most wonderful dream of all.  
Ymir grinned, a hoarse, creepy grin that spiked Loki directly through his soul.  
"Do not rely on your… how should I call him? Your… Asgardian concubine? He will not wake up for days."  
The giant got closer to him and reached out his hand carrying the light, now throbbing feebler, at the very front of Loki's sight that was slowly fading into darkness.  
"Look at yourself, son of Laufey, as long as you can. This is what is left of you."  
And he clenched his fist, ruthlessly, thoroughly around that last drop of life, annihilating it.   
Everything in Loki's mind went black, he could just hear him saying "Take him.", and then… nothing._

Heimdall, Thor though at the end. If there was someone on Asgard who had the power to _see_ whoever was getting in or out of the Realm at any moment, that was Heimdall. And even if it occurred to him that Loki could have yielded again to his dark side and plotted some new trick, Thor wasn't actually able to think his little brother had disappeared on purpose. He _just_ felt it was _wrong_.  
"You're looking for your brother," Heimdall stated as he saw Thor at the gates of the Bifrost. "He's not here anymore." He didn't let Thor even open his mouth. "It had to be a most powerful spell to keep me unaware. And you asleep, until now that I have been able to wake you up. It was three days ago."

_Three days before.  
Darkness.   
Ice against his skin, under his back. Tied.   
Unable to defend. Unable to move. Unable to think. Unable to see.   
His arms tightened over his head. His wrists aching. Pulsing. His mouth locked by a frozen muzzle. A million cold needles stinging his lips and freezing his tongue.   
Their smell. Their presence. The rough sound of their breath.  
_I should have seen this coming _, he thought in a blink of clarity.  
Cold. Void. Pain. Darkness.  
Everything ran so fast. From that wondrous first night, when he and Thor walked the first step into the lands of absolute mutual belonging, from the brightness of his brother's hug, from the golden illusion of a new way of living… to that end. To that unavoidable end.  
"You betrayed us all, son of Laufey. Time to pay for it."  
Weakness. _Ultimate _weakness.  
Loki had never felt so powerless in his life, and he had never been. So drained. So helpless.  
He had not strength enough even to ask himself how.  
He was simply aware it was over.  
"We took your magic sight, we obliterated your powers. So easy. Now learn what pain is really like, without your healing capabilities."  
_Thor… _, he muttered in his mind, and it sounded to him just as the echo of a severed memory.  
The first stroke hit him by surprise, directly on his chest, he felt the cold burning of his skin ripping, smelled his own blood, cried silently, appalled by a kind of pain he had never experienced before.  
Lost.  
"He will not come for you."_

Thor got lost in a whirl, _three days?_ "…What?" _How… what do you mean, spell? Are you saying it was him who…?_   
"No," Heimdall said on his thoughts, and his face didn't reveal any emotion. "It was _them_. They opened an interdimensional passageway. They took him."  
Thor gritted his teeth.   
"…where."  
Heimdall's blank eyes fixed inscrutable in his, while he spelled that name.  
"Jotunheim."

_Despair. Revulsion. Emptiness.  
Loki lost count of hours, of days. His body still strained, every single muscle in his arms so atrociously tense and hurting he was sure his joints were about to snap.  
And Thor was not coming. _"He will not come for you" _. Probably, he never would. He was trapped into that magic sleep. Perhaps even forever.  
He didn't listen to the charges they flung at him. He wasn't even reacting any longer to the dozens cold strokes they inflicted to his body with their frozen blades, for hours, for days. And when he peed himself under the blows he almost felt relieved. Blood dropping into his eyes, on his face, on his neck, his head burning, his whole body throbbing in pain at any smallest move. Pain. Pain? Pain was the last issue. Pain was already part of his new state of being. Pain, and blood, and exhaustion, and the sore blurring of his mind.  
Darkness was the real dreadful thing. Not just a physical darkness. An utter, boundless, shouting darkness that was the eternal metaphor to his existence, now extinguishing the very last sparkle of life still trembling in the deepest corner of his soul. And in that final sigh of light, the only one thought still able to hurt him to tears. Thor was not coming.  
But that didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore. How could he even think things could actually turn different? No change could have ever been real in his shattered life. Not his hopes, not his love. No place to belong to. No escape from what he really was, because that was the one and only reality meant for him.  
It would have been so sweet.  
To die.   
"Do not beg for death, little slut," the shadow of Ymir's voice said in the blackness. "You will not be so lucky."_

An endless, clear, burning universe of rage took the place of confusion inside Thor's mind and body, and a big part of that rage was against his own self. There was _one_ most vital thing in his life, there had always been since his childhood, and now more than ever: he inwardly vowed himself to protect his little brother with his own life, no matter what. From the nightmares that haunted his sleep, from the monsters he tried to cast away so many times, from the madness that so many times put his life in jeopardy. And - even if several times in the past Thor himself was forced to do that against his own will - from any possible harm. Almost unconsciously at first, then more and more wittingly, and now giving him the very wholeness of his deepest loyalty.  
Whereas, he failed him.  
"Heimdall, open the Bifrost," he growled. "And take me there."

_Hours elapsed. Days. Aeons, perhaps.  
Almost incapable of keeping his brain awaken and not even sensitive to his own body anymore,  Loki was drifting himself away in the darkness, quietly, hoping to be finally swallowed forever.  
There was a song, whispering through the fog in his mind, from nowhere. A sweet, sad song he didn't remember where or when he heard for the first time. _"Being silent, they scream…" _, that song said._ "Save me, and you'll be saved." _It spread wider and wider, filling every blank space, so softly and calming he just let himself float on the melody, wearily smiling inside at the idea he'd loved to sing it for Thor. How… odd.  
Then, from the Kingdom of Non-life, again came the voices, harshly crumbling his deadly reverie.  
"Your punishment is not over."  
And together with them, the final shame arrived.  
"You had good times with your Asgardian princess, didn't you."   
Loki gulped a gasp down in his throat, because in a short lucid moment he realized.  
"Now try us."  
He trembled slightly, that was the only thing he had still strength enough for. _"Us" _. How many_ "us" _there were, he could just guess._ Many _. A scary thought. And yet not the scariest. Tears merged with blood in his eyes. Until then, he never even thought to stoop so low as to plead them. But now, if he could talk, he would have begged for mercy. Not for himself. For Thor. For the safe of the only one unspoiled memory he had left. And if mercy had been death, he would have welcomed her.  
_ Why? _, he cried ruefully inside himself, for he perfectly knew he'd never find a way out from that nightmare._ I do not even deserve to just… die and spare… this? _  
"You do not deserve anything. And you will take back to Asgard a little gift from those who rule you."  
Loki couldn't see, or get the hidden meaning behind those words. While he desperately tried to grab the string of that song back, he just felt two ferocious, cold hands splaying his legs roughly, and then the first of them thrust into him like a beast, ripping his body apart in blood.  
_"Save me, and you'll be saved." _  
Under the frozen muzzle, his scream was so loud and harrowing that even the stars above shivered in anguish._

As Thor got there, it was like having flashes, and everything happened in a matter of seconds.   
Loki was tied up to an iced cliff. Naked. Injured. Apparently passed out. Blood on his face. On his hair. On his arms, and chest, and stomach, and legs. His eyes closed. Muzzled. His skin, _blue_. Thor suddenly realized that was his Jotun form, which he had never seen before. _Beautiful_. Naked. Injured. Injured. Blood even between Loki's legs. Injured. Tortured. _Raped_.   
"I'll say once" he snarled. "Release him."  
They didn't. And there they learned what was like to unleash Thor's wildest fury.

When finally Thor could reach Loki and set him free, he found his little brother was barely breathing. He held his head as gently as possible, to avoid adding more to the pain he was sure Loki was already suffering, _why are your injures so bad? What's wrong with your healing power?_  Bewildered by the mess of feelings struggling in his soul from the mix of rage, astonishment, grief, confusion… that _amazing_ blue… those _cute_ marks on his brother's face and arms and chest, he could just hold Loki's hand in his, staring at that bloodstained wonder mingled with agony. As Thor's fingers touched him, anyway, Loki's skin started getting clearer and those …odd marks… disappeared, returning to Thor's eyes the smooth and pale body he was so familiar with. And when he skimmed the frozen muzzle on his brother's mouth, sorrowful and not sure on what to do, it just thawed out and vanished, freeing Loki's lips covered with blood, but yet intact.  
"Loki… what have they done to you… open your eyes, look at me… Loki…"  
The cosy sound of his voice was enough to force Loki's eyelids to open and reveal his pupils, turning slowly back from red to green. Looking nowhere over Thor's head, chilled, empty. Terrified.   
"Thor…?"   
At first, Loki was sure he was raving. Or dreaming, maybe, the last, most tender dream while he was floating down towards the death he yearned so desperately for. Worlds away, the bleary feeling of a hand, warm, holding his one from a different level of existence.  
"…is that… you?"  
Together with the awareness, the pain suddenly flared up and it was a terrible strain to raise his hand and grope for Thor's face in the darkness. As he recognized him under his fingertips, he let a muffled sigh out.  
"…Thor… I can't… see you… I can't… see."  
Thor gasped. "Wh…"  
Loki's hand grasped his hair.  
"…you killed them…?"  
Thor bowed his face closer to his mouth, panting, smelled his blood, his hand on his cheek, chaos in his mind, his rage still burning.  
"I did."  
Loki let his arm fall back down, and rubbed his cheek against his brother's hand, soaking warmth up from Thor's palm as if that was the only way left to stay alive.  
"…thank you." He coughed in a grimace, a trickle of blood seeped out of his lips. "…are you… injured?"  
Thor shook his head, unseen, _me?_ , swallowing a lump of tears while looking at his little brother's tortured body, _you're worried about me?_    
"No, I'm not," he whispered, and the deep bleeding cut on his arm and the wound on his thigh weren't actually hurting so much. He laid the softest kiss ever on the blood on Loki's forehead, lightly stroking his hair. "Hush, little one… hush. Don't strive. I'm here, now. I'm here."  
Thor sounded so… _sweet_ when he called _him his little one_. And it felt so… _sweet being_ his little one. But… now? After that… extreme demeaning? Turning a bit on his side, Loki tiredly curled his knees up to his chest, trying to soothe and sorely hide the stabbing pain riving him between his legs and from there all across his soul.  
"… they… took my powers… and… they…" His tears drew little white lines through the blood on his face. "…I couldn't… I couldn't stop them."   
A sudden retch, he moaned, and threw up blood and spittle on Thor's hand, viciously, painfully, because he couldn't restrain that massive loathing any longer. Thor grabbed his nape, dreadfully worried, words dead in his throat; he rubbed his palm on his mouth to erase anguish together with sickness, and trying to allay his brother's torment he warily leant his other hand on his hip… He felt Loki quiver in shame and, at the mere sight of the brutal rent screaming blood between his brother's legs, his eyes suddenly filled with tears, while he cursed the entire Valhalla in his mind.  
Loki's breath was cold and feeble on his palm. His voice even feebler.  
"Thor… I'm so… sorry."  
A choked sob, barely hold just because Loki was too weak even to cry. Thor felt the blade of that abyss of despair piercing his heart directly through Loki's broken sigh, _shut up_ , he thought, _you're mine, I'm yours, nothing will change that, nothing_ , and he nestled his brother's head on his neck, rubbing his cheek on his hair.  
"Don't. Even. Ever."  
Then, as carefully as he could, he picked Loki up in his arms, simmering with rage and grief as his little brother wailed in pain and dropped his head on his chest, lifeless. And he ran, through the frost rain of Jotunheim, wishing to burn that entire world to ashes.


	3. Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When everything else is lost, the only one thing that is left becomes huge, neat and incredibly powerful.

"I'll take you to the healers," Thor said as they got back to Asgard, still carrying his brother in his arms.  
"No... not… now. Please."  
Whispering those few words from the bottom of his endless night, Loki tried to grab Thor's robe, but his fingers were too weak and his arm just fell back. Thor held him tighter to his chest, more and more anguished, for he knew his little brother's utter faintness was definitely something outside the norm.  
"Fine," he muttered on Loki's hair.  
Not Heimdall at the gates of the Bifrost, nor anyone else coming their way dared to say a word at their sight; and even if they did, Thor wouldn't have heard them, nor would have Loki. They were sealed off in their own sole dimension, no-one allowed to get in, no-one allowed to look in, no-one allowed even _to think in_.  
Thor kicked their room's door closed behind his back, together with the whole universe; with the utmost watchfulness he laid his brother down on their bed, his back first, then guided his head on the pillow, stretched his legs out gently, trying not to listen to the heartbreaking little yelps that Loki could not hold at any movement, and lied seated beside him. He lingered on him fondling his forehead, and hair, and cheeks, until he was sure Loki looked at least a bit less uncomfortable.  
"I'll be back in a second, little one," he said then, and left him just to take off his armour and enter the pool room to grab a couple from the dozens vials filled with the most prodigious ointments that Loki used to collect since he was a young boy, each one provided with amazing properties.  
From the stifling dusk which he was locked in, Loki tried to overcome his exhaustion and catch any smallest hint of Thor's presence around him. His steps on the floor, coming closer to the bed. His reassuring weight on the mattress, grazing his hip, the soothing sound of his breath, the timeless grove of his scent. The physical insight of his disarming smile trying to comfort him, surely lighting on his face in that moment, although vaguely stained with a quiver of angst. Could he just _see_ his smile, just that, just for a little while… everything would have turned better immediately.  
Could he. Just.  
 _"…And you will take back to Asgard a little gift from those who rule you."_  
Nuzzled on his knees at his brother's side on the bed, Thor began cleansing Loki's wounds, as carefully and tenderly as no-one ever on Asgard could even dare to imagine. How doting and lovesome those strong arms, hands and fingers could get on the body of their precious one, in the dim of a nightly room ideally detached from everything, would have been hard to believe to anyone, besides the two of them; but that was not an issue, because that tenderness wasn't anyone's concern, besides the two of them. That tenderness – so intimate and spontaneous, and not weakening, but fortifying Thor's soul instead, precisely because of its _intimacy_ and _spontaneity_ -, that tenderness was meant for Loki, and for him alone.  
"Tell me if I hurt you, alright?"  
Loki looked worn-out, and he just nodded, his eyes clamped, his breath short, his body caught in an almost undetectable flickering. Thor finished with the deep cut on his head and rubbed the cloth on Loki's mouth, thoroughly wiping away from his lips even the smallest drop of blood.  
 _You look so… innocent_ , he thought, unable to give in with the idea that his brother could have been so brutally injured. _Who would think of you as of an evil creature, seeing you as I'm seeing you now?_  
"How…" he murmured, now dealing with the slashes on Loki's chest, "…how could they do this to you? Do they really have such a great power?"  
Thor's graceful hands together with the prodigious ointment, so soft and fresh on Loki's wounds, were giving him the very first bit of relief, at least on a mere physical side; his mind and soul were still languishing in a thick, dark limbo where no certainty was alive anymore.  
"They… are the same… as me."  Loki's voice, when he collected strength enough to force a few words out, sounded hopelessly strained. "They know… how to destroy me." A feeble sigh, on Thor's hand now mildly running the cloth on the deep cuts on his arms. "They… just… can."  
Softly cleaning the blood from his brother's hand, Thor waffled beholding those gracious long fingers, so frail, those perfectly refined nails; he couldn't help taking that hand to his cheek and holding it there, just to make Loki sure he was by his side and there he'd have been until ever.  
"The healers will fix your sight," Thor said, laying a bunch of kisses on Loki's palm. "You don't have to worry."  
He was even more caring when he came to the fluffy nook of Loki's inguen, and he got whelmed by tenderness when he saw Loki's sex - by instinct, he guessed - muttering a shy erection while he cleaned it from the blood. But then, he reached the dreadful injury that ripped Loki's priceless blossom apart. Loki was still bleeding from inside through the atrocious gash between his legs, and it was like he was bleeding directly from his soul. His voice broke out in a gasp.  
"I… I don't want them… to see me… like this…"  
Thor paused for an instant, to talk to him with the sweetest voice he could find.  
"Then we will stay here alone, until you feel better."  
When Thor started kneading the terrible wound with the ointment on his bare fingers, trying to be as soft as he could, Loki shook in pain, gripped the sheet in his hands and couldn't hold a grievous groan that almost tore his brother's heart asunder.  
"I am so sorry, little one," Thor said, and his voice oozed an endless sorrow. "Please, be strong. For me." He grazed his cheek with his thumb, trying to soothe him, while he kept on spreading the liniment deeper inside, lightly, cursing his own self even if it had to be done and there was no other way, for the last thing he wanted in the universe was to cause him more harm. "It will be better soon."  
When he finished, Loki looked a bit more restful and Thor sighed with relief, while he poured some oil from another vial all over his brother's tummy and started applying it thoroughly with his hand, shivering with fondness in feeling Loki's breath pulse under his fingers.  
"This will stop your internal bleeding" he reassured him, "and ease your pain in a short while." He smiled sorely. "You taught me everything about all these oils of yours, you remember?"  
He saw Loki raising a pale smile at his words and tears almost welled up in his eyes.    
For a long instant, he stared at his little brother laying naked and faint on that bed. He could almost hear the silent scream of his torn body, _I can't even think you were so close to death_ , and he wondered in a shudder if he'd have survived to his loss. Perfectly knowing the answer. Then, he just let his eyes cherish that ravishing pearly skin, now so cold, so tormented. Countless times before that moment Thor had consumed his sight on _his little one's_ breathtaking body. While making love with him, and before, and after, or peering for hours at his profile while he was sleeping, or gazing at the shapely curve of his back and nates standing in the pale light of the dawn. Now, he was looking at him with new, different eyes. Now it was hurting and enraging to look at his body knowing how much pain and violence he was forced to endure. The entrancing satin of his slender, wonderfully designed and proportioned muscles on his thin arms, on his spindly, long legs. The elegance of his perfectly defined chest, the secret cherries of his tiny nipples. The alabaster vase of his abdomen, softly throbbing in distress. The redolent casket of his groin, the polished gem of his sex. _I could die just kissing every smallest corner of your body_. And the memory of the brief vision of his _other_ form, the awareness that such a miracle of beauty was living inside that same body made Loki even more rare, more invaluable.  
It was such a… _privilege_ to be _his chosen one_.  
Nonsense, he thought. Such a delicate, precious creature was not meant to be harmed. Or tortured. Or violated. No matter the sins of his previous life, he didn't deserve that, not now, nor before, nor ever. It was just something… unnatural. Nonsense.  
"Maybe… maybe I can live…" Loki whispered,  splintering Thor's thoughts into a slight silver rain "…without my powers. But…" A racking sob, while he turned his head aside trying to hide his tears. "…what if… I can't see you… ever again?..."  
His hands under his armpits, Thor raised him a little to hold him tight against his chest.  
"We will set things right. I promise." He cradled him in his arms. "Just… stop crying." _It kills me when I see you crying_. He ran his fingers through his hair, cuddly. "Please, Loki.  Stop."  
But Loki couldn't stop. Because he knew, he felt something had been fatally broken deep inside his inner self by those monsters.  
 _"…And you will take back to Asgard a little gift from those who rule you."_  
"They… did _something_ to me, when they..." It was just a hazy feeling, lost in the fog between darkness and pain, vague and undecipherable, and yet there, floating on the crushing weariness that made any sensation cloudy. "Something… _else_." Something more frightening than death itself. "I was a fool… thinking I could escape from… what I am." Something dangerously close to the awareness that _hope_ would have never been an option. "What I… _was_. I am… nothing, now."  
Thor's fingers on his waist, light as a whisper. Loki was breathing fast and smoothly, softly trembling from some unknown fever he could not restrain, like a cub that was just born too weak to stay alive on his own. For the very first time in his life, Thor felt him… terribly helpless, and helplessly tiny in his hands.  
"You're not right." His mouth on his little brother's ear, as if he was about to reveal him the most treasured of all secrets. "You're still everything." His lips on his cheekbones, sipping his tears, on his nose, on his chin. "To me."  
And he kissed him. The sweetest kiss he had ever leant on those lips. As though that was only thing he was desperately longing for since ever, Loki let himself drown in his mouth, no more thinking, no fear, no bridle, no defence. Suddenly overpowered by that ultimate yielding, Thor got… lost. His little one tasted so new and surprising, a mixture of blood, and blue, and ice, and _Loki_ , and Thor felt him clutching frantically at his tongue as if he was grabbing the strand of life itself. Without giving a break to that kiss, Loki slid his hand under Thor's vest, feverishly searching for his skin, for his warmth, for the profile of the muscles on his arms, on his chest… and feeling more and more appeased while recognizing the furrow of his collarbones, the line of his sternum, the turgescence of his nipples. It happened before they had blindfolded sex, just for fun, but now it was way different. It was like discovering a whole new universe in sensations, where the darkness was real, living, terrifying, and _touching_ was _essential_ to keep feeling alive, and safe, and… _loved_. They didn't stop kissing, not even while Thor took his robe off; and when Loki could finally stick himself to his brother's body, he craved he could melt down, softly, and be soaked under Thor's skin, drop after drop, to disappear in him and become part of him forever.  
It was Loki's hand that gently drove Thor's on his groin, as he whispered in his mouth the fondest moan ever, while getting harder in his brother's soft clasp. Every single part of his body was still aching, though the healing ointment was easing his pain a little; but again, pain was the last issue. On the contrary, under his brother's sweet touch and melded with the unleashed pleasure Thor's wise hand was giving him, pain suddenly turned into some new, flawless wonder that whipped him away softly, on the wave of their kiss that still was unending. They were lying down on their side, one-to-one, now slowly fondling their groins together, Thor's hand still running smoothly on his brother's shaft, their tongues still woven, Loki's fingers petting Thor's hair, and nape, and shoulders, and arms, and chest, and back, and loins. As if he was afraid to break that frail instant of perfect ravish, Loki instinctively held his moans silent, letting his body just shiver his rapture all over Thor's… and instinctively Thor did the same, and he was aroused by that more than he had ever been.  
Slightly grazing Thor's nipples with his, and melting with pleasure as they got more and more turgid, Loki breathed deeply on his brother's erection cherishing his tummy in a slow, delicate movement. It was so unusual and at the same time so amazingly overwhelming to commit himself totally to his own touch, and totally indulge to his brother's. _Love, sex_ … tasted so unique and unforeseen, that night. So flawlessly _pure_. So… _vitally crucial_. But that was an unique and unforeseen night. They didn't let go of each other's mouth, never for a second, while the rest of their bodies talked the most precious unspoken words to one another, on Loki's still burning wounds, on Thor's lavish affection, on their muffled moans and their uncontrollable shivers. The air smelled so strange and inebriating, a jumble of blood and clay, of liniments and hair, of ache and grass, and skin, and sweat, and tears, and sex. Pain and arousal kept growing together through Loki's body, and it was like one could not exist without the other, while their mix – little by little – completely filled the darkness, wiping every other anxiety out.  
In a slight gesture, Loki raised his leg and bent it on Thor's hip, his foot behind Thor's back, pulling lightly, and coiled his fingers around his brother's wand, driving it gently between his nates.  
Thor got unstuck from his mouth, panting smoothly, just to rustle his sudden concern. His hand soft on his little brother's loin, while the other one never stopped brushing his trembling shaft.  
"Loki… I don't want… to hurt you…"  
Loki searched his lips again, softly gasping, covered them with a million tiny kisses, and leant himself on his glans, mild as a breath. For the first time that night he opened his eyes wide in the darkness, trying to guess where Thor's face actually was, and smiled at him the sweetest smile ever.  
"You… won't."  
 _And I need to have you in me_. That would erase shame, and despair, and the murky feeling of having been despoiled, and everything unutterable. Maybe even the echo of the muddy, iced words that despite everything kept on blinking in his brain.  
Thor kissed the corners of his mouth, delicately, then he searched his tongue again, while pushing into him as carefully and as gently as he could. He felt Loki tensing in his arms, and shaking in a long, ruffled shiver, so he pulled deeper, slowly. Loki dug his nails in Thor's back and his tongue in his throat; Thor's shaft was fiercely burning inside him, rubbing on the blood of his still open wounds, but that burning was made of pure aliveness, and unconditional devotion, and ultimate pleasure.  
It was a wholehearted rapture that Thor felt whirling all across Loki's body, so uncontrolled and pandering that forced his eyes to fill with tears, and his manhood to seek him deeper and deeper, and his mouth to sink his brother's, and his arm to huddle him so tight he almost smothered him.  
 _Everything in the Nine Realms is worthless living for, except you_ , Thor thought into Loki's head, _and I will devote my life to you, and my soul, and my power_ , desperately hastening his hand on the top of his brother's sex, as under his fingers slid the first, warm drop of pre-cum.  
 _Never, ever let me go from you farther than this_ , Loki thought into Thor's, _and I will never, ever fear the darkness anymore_ , and clung his whole body around his brother's stinging manhood, wildly extinguishing in a painful ecstasy his last burst of strength.  
He suddenly felt Thor couldn't hold much longer, and he neither. He grabbed Thor's head in his hands, the tip of his nose brushing his brother's, "I want to… come… in your hand…", he panted smoothly on the warm dampness of his lips, Thor's grip got faster on his wand, and his sex pierced him so deeply he thought he'd have never survived to that climax.  
 _Come_ , Thor's shaft whispered, spilling, and spilling, and spilling silently inside him, and made Loki shudder all over Thor's skin for an endless while, unrestrained.  
"Come," Thor's voice sighed almost begging in his mouth, and with a sweet, long little moan Loki rained again and again, slowly, in his brother's grasp.

It took them aeons to re-emerge from that turmoil of feelings, and yet when they got slightly back everything stayed afloat in a timeless in-between. Loki was still breathing softly in Thor's mouth, their lips and tongues still brushing in a cluster of mellow and peaceful kisses, unable to come loose nor to let go the improbable magic of that night, Loki's arm bent on his brother's chest and their hands in one, their fingers tangled together. As their souls.  
Loki felt drained. But it was a delightful sensation, now. He smiled in the dark, on Thor's lips, and kissed him again.  
"You carry…" A kiss. "…my blood…" And another. "…on your…" And another. "…Mjolnir… now."  
Vaguely stunned by his little brother's scent, Thor kissed him back, one more time, and one more, and one more.  
"And again you have the best part of the power of Thunder inside you," he answered.  
They giggled, because that sounded as a joke, but somehow Loki was certain that a bit of truth was involved in those words. As certain as Thor himself was. He was a god, and a god could undoubtedly choose to share some of his powers, most of all with _his one and only_ and most of all through the living force that his semen was. He could almost smell Loki's confidence, even if a shadow of concern rose back in his soul as he felt his brother stirring in a sudden chill.  
"Are you sure you don't want me to take you to the healers?" he whispered.  
Loki huddled up closer to him and hid his face between Thor's neck and shoulder, trying in his mind to turn the darkness weighing all around him into the memory of the most quiet and appealing Asgardian night he could think of.  
"Tomorrow." His voice came out washer than ever before. "I am… so tired. Just let me… sleep… here, with you. Makes me… feel so… safe."  
Thor plunged his nose in his hair, breathing his skin, and heaved a long sigh. He was aware of his brother's conditions, but nevertheless he had no intention to break a priceless instant of perfection that looked like it could last till forever. So, he didn't move even a muscle, and restricted himself to just listening to his heart, pretty confident that things would have turned right anyway. Now that Loki – _his_ Loki - was back and safe in his arms.  
"Sure, little one." He muttered on his brother's forehead. "Sure."  
His mind relentlessly fading away, and unable to foil the deadly tiredness that was taking him down to unconsciousness, in spite of all Loki could almost _see_ his brother's smile cherishing his eyebrow. Pain was still there, but softened, just a distant relic of his past, of the ancient wickedness he definitely paid enough for. And fear was still there too, whirring misty in his soul, and slowly surrendering to a main, basic need of rest. Then he simply let go, lapsing into the reassuring strength of the embrace of his mighty caretaker. His magnificent lover. His gorgeous, candid, sweet god.  
He just couldn't suppress that ominous, feeble chilling that never stopped wobbling his limbs.  
"Why… is it… so cold…?"  
Thor winced, for it wasn't actually cold, that night. He tried not to listen to the renewed concern and he just tucked the sheets in, holding his brother tighter and brushing his arms and shoulders and back to warm him up.  
"You know, Loki?" he went, grabbing that random thought and closing his eyes on the wonderful sound of his name. "Your… _other_ form… is so… beautiful…"  
Loki shivered with wonder and laid a soft kiss behind his brother's ear.  
"You… really… think so…?"  
Thor nodded on his forehead, his stubble tickling his skin.  
"Absolutely. Never… ever despise what you are, promise me."  
"Well, then…" Loki breathed on his neck, forgetting for a moment that he couldn't see colours anymore. "…sometimes… I'm going to… turn myself blue… just for you."  
His body was now colder than a winter on Niflheim and his head heavier than a thousand Mjolnirs, but he felt calm, and ready to give up to the gods of numbness, tightly curled up to his brother's heat. He was ready to finally let everything vanish into the deep, no matter what would occur ever after. He felt so gratified when, just at the last gleam of consciousness, he realized that the glaring feeling he became so used to before everything happened, and that he was so sure he had lost forever, was back. And, alone in the emptiness the loss of everything had left, it was back huge, neat and incredibly powerful. Not only Thor was the bright side to his darkness, not only he was the one right complement to his existence. No matter the place, no matter the time, Thor was… _home_. His arms, his hands were home. His skin was home. His mouth was home. His scent was home. His breath was home. His sex was home. And for him, now, roughly thrown into the unbearable and never expected realm of weakness, for him, doomed in the blackest abyss of ultimate impotence, that was paradoxically _enough_.  
Nothing more was important, perhaps had never been.  
 _"…And you will take back to Asgard a little gift from those who rule you."_  
No.  
As long as he was home in his brother's arms, nothing evil could ever happen.  
As long as he was home in his brother's arms, darkness itself could stop being a nightmare and  become a companion.  
And as long as he was home in his brother's arms, even if he had fallen asleep not to wake up anymore, he would have fallen asleep peacefully.


	4. Elsewhere

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Words are powerful. Sometimes, even more powerful than a mighty hammer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, now I definitely don't know where this will take me (liar, I perfectly know instead). But wherever it is, it will be _with them_.

_The smell rose strong.  
So strong and familiar through the frosty air in the night that he suddenly woke up.  
His nostrils widened in the dark, whooshing tiny clouds of condensed breath out, snuffling.  
Sweat. Blood. Hormones.  
Close enough.  
Powerful.  
His olfaction shuddered, his muscles tensed, his coat bristled, while drool began clumping in his throat. All his senses turned ready in a trice.  
Uncontrollable urge. Thirst. Hunger. Yearning.  
A day, or a year, or ages before he picked that peculiar smell up the last time, he could not remember, because every bit of time, present, past, or future, was exactly the same instant in his life. Because the concept of time itself didn't belong to him.   
The smell did.  
That smell.  
That irresistible and unique mix of sweat, and blood, and hormones that always had the power to unleash his fiercest and blindest greed.  
To force him to let any other possible prey go free.  
Because any other possible prey, as compared with that, became poor.  
Because that smell was _Aesir.

The morning after, Loki did not wake up.  
At first, Thor ascribed that to the hell his little brother had been through, and let him sleep without leaving his side, no matter if he probably was needed in Odin's presence to be accountable for the new state of things between his Realm and Jotunheim.   
But Loki did not wake up even the whole day along, nor the next night, nor the next day. There, Thor understood things would have not turned right so soon.

**Void.  
Non-existence.  
Mist. Black mist.  
Awaken.  
Standing.  
Nothing under his feet.  
Nothing above.  
Nothing around.  
Just mist, black mist. Heavy. Cold.  
Awaken, and seeing.  
Alone.  
Depleted.  
No sound.  
No voice.  
No thought.  
No-one around.  
Fear.  
 _Is this how death looks like?_  
Then, in the mist, a presence.  
Calling his name.  
His name.  
"Loki."**

_Lone as he had been since ever, fearsome and magnificent, he stood out in the night.  
Could someone think all evils in the worlds, known and unknown, and gather up them all, that would have been their form.  
No creature alike walked the lands of the Nine Realms ever before. He didn't belong there. Or better still, he didn't belong _just _there. His head, his jaws were wolf, as wolf was his black fur, ruffled by ice; the rest was_ something else _, something unstable, apparently unable to keep steady in just one shape; and he was there and wasn't, never walking on just one ground, but moving his steps constantly from_ there _to_ elsewhere _, to some flimsy place lost between dimensions. His eyes were burning glass, green, red, and green, and red, and black; grains of damnation ran across their relentless look.  
The part of him that was wolf howled at the stars, viciously; he began running, fast, down the snowy woods of Niflheim, tracking the heady Aesir spoor down. And parched to death every living thing just at his passage, like a plague spreading implacable straight from the Reign of Doom._

"His injuries are almost healed," the First Healer said. "His whole condition is not."  
Thor couldn't hold a distressed look on his face nor keeping stroking softly his brother's forehead and hair, sitting next to him at the side of the bed. He shook his head, unable to understand, burning inside with a renewed storm of rage and anguish.   
He rose his sight on the First Healer, darts in his eyes.  
"What is going on with him?" he roared. "Tell me! How is that you can't help him? Did you lose all your abilities at once?"  
The Healer just bowed his head.  
"I am sorry, my lord. It seems we can't deal with his sleep. He is not simply… _sleeping_. It is not from natural causes, it must involve some magic. One of a sort we are unprepared to manage."

**"Follow."  
Disoriented.  
Seeing, but seeing nothing.  
His legs freezed.  
His arms lifeless.  
His body petrified.  
His mind blank.  
Again, his name being called.  
"Loki."  
A wince.  
His eyes searching. In vane.  
Tangible feelings.  
His suit, on.  
His helmet, on.  
In his right hand, his spear.  
"I said. Follow."**

_The thick ice of the lake screeched under his claws as he abruptly stopped his rush.  
He pointed his snout high to the night, over the tree tops that framed the frosty expanse; he caught an annoying breath of bonfire tampering the purity of the track.  
He growled hoarsely, his drool freezing as it dripped out of his jaws.  
Fire. Smoke. Cooked food.  
Disgusting stench to his bloodthirsty soul craving for living Aesir flesh. But yet vital. Because fire, and smoke, and cooked food meant prey. So close, now. So close.  
His steps were wadding on the snowy mantle, his huge, nervous black body was one with the darkness, moving fast and invisible and as soft as a blow; he trembled fickle between _there _and_ elsewhere _. There, the darkness was friend, the snow was friend, the underbrush burned by winter and by his proximity, disguising his presence, was friend.  
His eyes only, chilly changeling emeralds that knew nothing else but the excitement for hunt, kept twinkling fierce in the blackness.  
His eyes, capable of seeing the most elusive movement in the blackest night.  
His eyes, that never blinked while he was chasing.  
His glassy eyes, that froze into the Aesir's as he stepped out from the bushes, forcing them and the whole wood around in a ruthless living death for a neverending instant._

Again, Thor stared at Loki's face. He looked so peaceful and somehow lost far away in his unnatural sleeping. Under his closed lids, Thor saw his eyes moving and trembling lightly, same he had seen already the many times he just rested his soul watching him while he was dreaming. A dream. A nightmare. He lifted his brother's head, he held his neck, he grabbed his shoulders, shook him again, pointlessly. 

**Focusing.  
His heart beating.  
His breath hastened.  
His skin creeping.  
Alive.  
Alive nowhere, but still… alive.  
No pain.  
Delightful.  
No pain anymore.  
Willpower.  
At last, his voice. Echoing in the mist.  
"Who… are you?"  
A sneer, unseen.  
"You. Should know. Loki."**

_A long, inebriated snarl.  
When he attacked, he gave them no time even to let their instinct raise their swords for them.  
No time to scream.  
The choked sough of his tusk plunging, clenching their throats, the dumb crackle of their necks snapping were the only sound that broke the silence. Like he was following some unconscious ritual, he tore their chest apart and sank his jaws in the pulsating flesh, breathing the blood and aiming to the heart. The heart. Because the heart had to come first, every time, no matter what. And because Aesir heart tasted so better than any other. His whole body seethed in relish when his mouth mangled and swallowed the warm, still beating muscle. He finally felt blasting all across his limbs that overbearing hit of strength he was so hankering after, that drove his hunger blind, and that - he knew so well - could come from Aesir heart only._

When Thor saw his brother suddenly bleeding from his mouth out from nowhere, his heart ran cold and he just raised a shocked gaze on the Healer. Who simply shook his head. With his thumb, Thor wiped the blood away from Loki's mouth and chin, trying to erase dismay together with it.  
"Loki, please…" Loki's head was so heavy in the hollow of his arm. "I know you can hear me. Loki." His hair brushed Thor's elbow, and Thor cradled him slowly, forcing himself not to cry in front of the healers. "Oh, Loki… wake up. Please."  
No way.

**_I am. Awaken._  
So far. So bleary.  
But still, so warm.  
Thor's voice.  
An echo.  
Fading…  
He pushed out in the mist.  
…fading.  
 _Help me…_  
Vanished.  
An invisible grab tugging him deeper.   
Within the void.  
"Come. Loki."  
A step.  
"Just. Come."**

_After he satisfied his hunger, he shook his pelt and turned around to vanish toddling beyond the darkness, not a second look at what was left of two once magnificent warriors who dared to adventure too deeply into a realm that was not meant for them. None of the things that could have happened_ there _was his concern. Not anymore. Not till the next time the cramps of craving would shout him awaken from his_ elsewhere _.  
In the wood the silence fell again, heavier.  
And in the silence, the wind whined through the trees and the bonfire slowly burnt out; the blood around, softly melting the snow, sparkled in the moonlight like a handful of rubies, scornfully thrown away by the hand of someone who had nothing but hatred left to feel._

In a rush of anger, Thor leapt up clenching his fist, so suddenly and fiercely that all the healers moved a step back.  
"I'm going back there and force them to tell me how to break the spell!", he growled. "No matter if I have to kill them all!"  
The First Healer rose his hand coyly, being careful not to make Thor more upset than he already was.  
"My lord, please," he said. "That wouldn't be wise. You will never know if they are telling you the truth, even if you torture them to death. Let us try to deal with it first."   
Thor compelled his rage under control, well aware the Healer was right but, at the same time, not taking a stand made him feel powerless, confused, and hopelessly frantic. Something that could drive him mad. He fell back sitting at Loki's side, unhopeful, and took his brother's hand.  
"What… what can I do to help him, then?"  
"Just stay here and talk to him. It will keep his mind awaken."  
Thor leant a puzzled glimpse on the Healer's face.  
"Talk?... I'm not so good at talking." He looked back at his brother, doubtful. "And what could words ever do that my strength couldn't?"  
"Words are powerful, my lord. Sometimes, even more powerful than a mighty hammer."  
Thor sighed, still hesitant.  
"What… should I tell him?"  
"You share with him more than anyone else could ever share with anyone, my lord. Tell him about something just the two of you know. No matter what it is, it will help him not to loose himself into the sleep."  
Although slightly meaningless to him, Thor found that a pretty worthy answer to lead himself to swallow the last tangle of anger.  
"Leave us alone, all of you," he replied bitterly. "And go do your work."  
He waited until he heard the healers' steps dying away along the corridor, beyond their room's door now locked. Then he crawled into the bed, slowly slipping behind his brother, put his arms around his waist and held him on his lap; for a while he just listened to him sleeping on his bosom, still unable to handle that situation, so far from his usual and because of that even more anguishing. _A magic sleep_ , he thought, _and who knows what else_. That was not something he could raise Mjolnir, nor use his force against. Magic, spells, tricks… that was not his field at all. That was… Loki's.   
He tightened his arms closer around him. _No_ , he jiggled himself, regaining resolution. _Maybe they wiped your powers, but still you are godly breed. Never forget that. And never forget I'm at your side, forever._  
"So, he says I must talk to you," he whispered, his lips caressing Loki's forehead. "Tell you a story that just the two of us know."  
He smiled sadly, just a bit relieved when he felt Loki's skin warming up a little as he wrapped him in his cuddle.  
"A story." He pressed his mouth on his temple, talking to him as if Loki was perfectly conscious and able to hear his words. "Usually you are the one who enjoys reading and telling stories."  
The soft weight of Loki's body laying abandoned on his was a most disarming feeling. And it was so sorely weird talking to Loki and getting no answer from him. Thor sighed softly.   
"A story…"   
He kissed him on his hair, stretching his legs a bit around his brother's hips to make them both more comfortable. _A story…_  
"Oh, but there is one. One you never told me the end."  
He closed his eyes, breathing his skin.  
"Remember that day in the library?"

**Pulled back.  
On the border.  
 _I do._  
Memories.  
Tears in his eyes.  
 _I do… I… do._  
His soul bleeding.  
Just… bleeding.  
So light the rest of his inner self deprived of all powers.  
So clear.  
So empty.  
And… so weird.  
 _…I do…_  
A chuckle, again.  
Confusion.  
"No, Loki. You better. Not."**

_It smelled ancient.  
It smelled history, and legend, and forgotten tales on the muffled echo of his steps moving in with a sort of respectful bashfulness. Immense, burdening, as the heavy portals slowly creaked closed behind his back, the library swallowed him in its dusty silence, while the huge shelves vanishing high in the dark stroke him with their almost unknown power, together with the legacy of a facet of existence that actually never belonged to him.  
It was close to desert, and the few people scattered here and there at the big desks looked even tinier in the vastness of the place; his heart had a warm start when he saw Loki sitting in the farthest and dimmest corner of the library, all alone, wearing a soft pale green robe half unbuttoned on his chest, his head bent on an old tome and his silky hair falling softly on his cheeks. He was so focused on his book that it he didn't notice Thor coming closer, hesitating for a while and then stopping to just stare at him. Thor had never been interested in books and reading, both were a sort of mystery to him, because he could hardly understand what could be so appealing in mere, static words imprinted on poor paper. Just the opposite of Loki, who was deeply attracted by books, and literature, and poetry since he was a young boy. One of the many things that made the two of them so different and so complemented. Because of that, watching Loki while he was reading, caught so deeply into his tome as though in that moment that was the only existing thing in the known universe, to Thor's eyes was amazing. And when he was reading, Loki was stunningly beautiful. He was doing something so far from Thor's usual imagination. His eyebrows frowning in stops and starts, his lids squinting while he ran the pages, the corners of his lips trembling subtly, his teeth nibbling his lower lip like he was carried away in the most enthralling and mysterious adventure.  
Now his whole face, so pale and unreal in the dusky half-light of the library, was talking pleasure and wonder, together with a soft veil of sadness; and Thor asked himself what mixture of words in the Nine Realms might be able to generate such a complex of feelings just being read.  
He reached his little brother silently at the back of his chair and put his hands on his shoulders, under his hair, sliding his fingers inside Loki's vest to tap his skin. Loki winced, curtly interrupted from his trip, shivered with pleasure recognizing the touch and tipped his head back, swamping Thor's face with his huge, languishing eyes. For a few endless seconds, he eased his gaze down on his brother's chest, so gorgeous and tempting under his open singlet.  
"Here you are," Thor whispered with a smile. "I should have known."  
Rising his hand backwards, Loki grabbed his head and pulled it down to his lips, to lean a slow kiss on his mouth.  
"You missed me?"  
Thor's hand was now cherishing his throat, soft, warm. His eyes locked in his little brother's.  
"Every single second in my life that I don't see you."  
They indulged for a while smirking at each other, then Loki's head bowed on the book again.  
"It's very nice outside, today," Thor went, brushing his brother's neck. "Why don't we go for a ride?"  
"In a while."  
Thor straddled behind him on his chair and took him on his knees, putting his arms around his waist and his chin on his shoulder. He breathed on his cheek. Loki leaned on him tamely, eyes still steady on his tome, and basked softly, feeling his brother's jewel slowly hardening under his nates through the clothes. He gloated inside at the patency that he actually could not resist to Thor's touch, and he knew it, and he wanted it. And he enjoyed it so much.  
"Can they see us?" Thor muttered in his ear, brushing his hair aside with his nose to nip his lobe.  
In a smooth shiver, Loki glanced up to the few people around in the library, moved his hand in a fast, undetectable gesture and froze them all in some undefined in-between.   
"Now they can't," he twinkled. "And the doors are locked. No-one can get in." He giggled shamelessly, softly tensing under Thor's fingers slowly opening his vest. "Or out. You have no way to escape, now."  
"What are you reading?" Thor asked, his voice smooth, his tongue on Loki's neck, his fingers lightly touching the skin on his brother's tummy.  
A sigh, and a sort of sweet melancholy in Loki's voice.   
"Midgardian ancient tales."   
He felt Thor's surprise with no need to see his face directly, and smiled, slyly, pretending to dodge his brother's little kisses on his nape.   
"You know I'm not so fond of Midgardians… as you are, but…" He rubbed his cheek on Thor's lips, letting lust blend with the evocative universe still wide open in his mind. "…but I must admit they were capable of writing, at least in their past ages."  
Thor uncovered his shoulders and felt him shiver under his mouth softly moistening his skin. Holding the book in his hands, Loki indulged to his brother's touch, allured by the fact that it was happening in one of the most sacred places he could think of.  
"This is an epic poem called Aeneid. It's about gods and heroes." He trembled, feeling Thor's hard-on pressing on his loin while he was speaking. "They had gods and heroes besides us, you know." He smiled candidly on Thor's breath getting faster on his neck. "And most of their gods were far more mischievous than me. But what I love the most is their heroes. Listen."  
Thor stuck his head out of his brother's shoulder to peek into the pages, shivering at the sound of his voice. It was velvet to his ears. So terribly sensual.  
"_Nigh where the foes their utmost guards advance,   
To watch the gate was warlike Nisus' chance. _"  
So seductive. Tempting. Irresistible.  
"_His father Hyrtacus of noble blood;   
His mother was a huntress of the wood,   
And sent him to the wars. Well could he bear… _"  
Loki's vest slipped off on the lines, freeing his back to Thor's tongue.  
"_…his lance in fight, and dart the flying spear,   
But better skill'd unerring shafts to send.   
Beside him stood Euryalus, his friend… _"  
His voice became more languorous under Thor's manly, passionate grip on his shoulders.   
"_…Euryalus, than whom the Trojan host   
No fairer face, or sweeter air, could boast-   
Scarce had the down to shade his cheeks begun. _"  
Under his teeth delicately nibbling the skin on his neck, on his nape, on his blade.   
"_…One was their love, and their delight was one:   
One common hazard in the war they shar'd,   
And now were both by choice upon the guard. _"  
He closed the book and turned his head a bit to reach Thor's lips craving for his mouth. He stopped talking and let his brother kiss him, a long, intense kiss. Then he turned back to lay the book on the desk, keeping his hand on the cover for a while, almost caressing it.  
"It's beautiful."  
Thor's hands slid inside his pants.  
"_You _are beautiful." He held him tighter against his shaft, still hidden under the clothes, but now as hard as marble. "And I can't have enough of you."  
Loki couldn't hold a tiny, sassy titter, slowly arousing under his brother's skilful touch.  
"Me neither."  
Thor puffed in his hair, vaguely upset.  
"I mean it, little one."  
As an answer, Loki just turned himself again, squeezed his brother's cheeks and stamped a kiss on his lips.  
"Me too, silly…" A softer kiss. "…sweet…" And another, longer, deeper. "…big one."  
He bowed ahead, following the gentle pressure his brother's hands induced to his shoulders, and unleashed himself to Thor's hot tongue soaking his nape and back. He closed his eyes, carried away on the rainbow bridge of carnality, delightfully losing his contact with reality.    
Then, in a rush, Thor stood up and bent him forward on the desk, the chair screeched on the floor, the table creaked, the book fell down; he nailed his brother's head on the wood surface, and humming, hoarsely, ripped his pants off.   
Loki moaned with surprise.    
"Ooh… brutal…" He tensed his loins backwards, under Thor's tongue now running down along his spine to reach him between his nates and venture deep inside his cozy little flower. "I love it… when you play brutal…"  
Thor quivered at his words, groaned at his sighs, sank his teeth into his brother's flesh, making him whimper. He plunged into the inebriating flavour of Loki's secret ring, he felt it pulsing wildly, getting warmer and warmer around his tongue that searched in him convulsively, and only when he had filled it with his foam he raised his eyes again.  
"Oh, you do."  
He pressed his hand more tightly on Loki's neck and cheek, and swung his head over his brother's to catch his grimace of enjoyment when he stuck four fingers in a row inside him and pushed.  
"So…" And pushed, not letting Loki even move his head from his fierce grip. "…you like it…" And pushed, slipping his thumb inside too, and then his whole hand, and panted with delight on Loki's squeal. "…this way?"  
Loki's whole body trembled, his moans echoed in the silence, between the shelves from where the dusty eyes of history were sheepishly peeping out.   
"Oh, Thor…" He drooled on the desk, his brother pushing deeper, "…you can't even…" and falling on his sweaty back, froth on his hair, "…think…", his arm pushing so deep that Loki shrieked and felt like Thor was trying to reach and grab his heart straight from the inside.  
His groans got more intense, his whining louder, his inner self shouted his fever pitch aloft. Letting himself being subdued like that, completely, in such a rough and hurting way, was more exciting and fulfilling than anything Loki could imagine. It was the most decisive proof he could give Thor of his unreserved fondness, and because of that, paradoxically, it made him feel more free than any other thing. Moreover, it was a twisted pleasure knowing that anyhow he was the one who led the game, for he could have stopped Thor at any time; but he'd never done that, because where everyone else in the known worlds and further could never even dare to think to subdue him in any way, Thor was the only one allowed to do that to his liking. And welcomed. And for that, loved.  
On his loudest scream, as roughly as he pushed his hand in, Thor pulled it out at once, wringing a sudden yelp from his brother. Planting his feet against Loki's he forced him to broaden his legs wider, still pinning his face against the table; without giving him the time to breathe he rammed his manhood abruptly into him, and thrust on Loki's shout, and thrust, and thrust until he made him howl a cluster of _yes _of pleasure.  
Thrusting inside him more and more fiercely, Thor clasped him, an arm around his chest, a hand grabbing his sex, with such vehemence that he lifted him from the floor; they groaned, they panted together, both running amok, their heads going hog wild in dizziness; as they dragged back on the chair, Thor's coarse grip raised Loki's leg high and blocked it, wider, to stick him into the deepest, and make him cry out again; his grasp running swifter and almost squeezing Loki's shaft, so hardened and throbbing that it hurt, pointing the ceiling and beyond it the sky.  
His back squashed against his brother's soaked chest, Loki threw his head back on Thor's shoulder as Thor's ramming got so fast, and fierce, and deep that his whole body could not dominate its quivers any longer. When he felt Thor's warm spurt filling his bowels, again, and again, and again, he cried a long, desperate moan, together with his brother, and squirted so badly and so impetuously that his sperm drenched even Thor's face and his. He didn't stop shaking uncontrollably, as Thor didn't stop rubbing his wand, nor pushing, frantically, until he made him spout the very last drop.  
For an eternal instant, the whole time-space continuum stopped on their climax, and everything went blank around them, clung to the highest pinnacle; then, their breathing getting milder, their eyes still closed, they slowly panted back to calmness and reality, resting, one thrown over the other. Neither of them could utter a single word for ages, so they let the perplexed silence fallen back in the library talk in their place; and Loki relished inside, thinking they just profaned that most holy cradle of knowledge in such a lecherous and yet delightful way.   
"Turn around", Thor whispered at the end, breaking the entrancement. He followed with his eyes Loki changing position and sitting back on his legs, head-on. They watched at each other's face, still moistened with Loki's scented juice, they smiled with empathy; at the same time, with the same kindness, they approached their lips to one another's cheek and religiously licked each other clean.   
Then they just stayed in each other's eyes, green melted in blue, contemplating the hugeness of a… _love _that was too far beyond any possible phrasing to be caged into the tiny box of those few letters.  
"How could we live a life…" Loki muttered on Thor's nose "…a whole life, until now, missing all this?"  
Thor rubbed his hands gently along his hips, resting soft on his waist.  
"I'm still asking myself, little one," and he leant a mellow kiss just in the middle of his brother's chest, while the dim in the library became warmer and cosier, hugging them in an ethereal embrace and sealing the cosmic rightfulness of their unwritten pact.  
"Well…" Loki went, after a while. "What about that ride?"  
Thor raised his eyebrow, smirking at him.  
"Are you in the mood for riding, now? Didn't I ruin your pretty little ass enough for today?"  
Loki ran his fingers through his soft, long hair, giggling, forehead on his forehead.  
"Oh, you're still far away from that, my handsome." And he hugged him, quietly laying his cheek on his shoulder. "But you are the most extraordinary lover I ever had. And ever will."  
Thor grumbled a hum right on his ear.  
"I see. And did you have many?"  
His arms around Thor's shoulders, Loki lifted his head, tilted it sideways a bit and leant a puzzled look on his face.  
"Yes, many," he purred, sensually. "Why, you did not?" He smiled, dunking his eyes in the blue of his brother's. "But now I have just one."  
Thor grabbed his nape, now serious, thumb on his cheek.  
"You better do."  
On Loki's smug little face, a look between curious and amused.  
"Is that a threat?" He grinned. "You jealous?"   
He took his thumb in his mouth and started sucking it, lustfully, keeping an impudent leer fixed in Thor's eyes. Thor shuddered, trying – but not actually willing - to keep his renewing arousal under control.  
"…sometimes," he stuttered.  
"I'm flattered," Loki whispered, holding his brother's palm against his lips. Then, with thoughtful slowness, his satin mouth began dipping Thor's neck. "But you shouldn't be." From one ear to the other, he leant a chain of feathery wet marks all along his brother's throat. _Feel me _, his tongue said. "Whereas, you should be even more confident and proud…"  And lingered mildly on Thor's collarbones. "…when I tell you that you are the best among many."  
Staunchly, his lips ran down his brother's chest, his sternum first, then the furrows that fringed his brawn, then his left nipple, that became turgid, timidly at first, as his mouth touched it; Thor guided his brother's head mildly with his hands, his fingers through his hair. Loki's tongue played carefully with that nipple, as though it was a tiny little creature living on its own, small sips and bites, then more intense, and more, and didn't stop until he heard Thor letting out a deep groan of pleasure. Then, lapping his way slowly across his brother's bosom, he reached the other nipple to play the same with it; feeling Thor losing himself so meekly in the mercy of his mouth stirred in his throat a sudden lump of enjoyment.  
"…oh, Loki…" Thor just sighed, while his brother slid kneeling on the floor between his legs, and simply let him play, unable to remember in his life a more alluring, skilful mouth than Loki's. Oh, the things he could do with his mouth. With his lips. With his tongue. Now gliding down on his belly, to dig into his navel. And then, as delicate as a nightly song, to whet wisely all the most sensitive corners of his groin. To slowly graze the walls of his manhood, stiff as a flagpole against Loki's face, and reach the top, where it stayed long, to cuddle it in a thousand new and unexpected ways, before letting the lips wrap the vibrant glans.  
When Loki made his brother's wand disappear into his mouth, Thor thought he'd come at once.  
None of the women he had sex with before was ever even close to take it in its whole majesty as did Loki. From the first time it happened. In fact, it was like sex never existed in Thor's life before, from the very first instant he… _found _Loki. His little trickster. No-one in the Nine Realms, no-one in the past, nor in the future could ever be even comparable to him. On the wave of ecstasy, he smiled to the heavens among the moans, giving his deepest thanks for such a gift. His Loki. His amazing, unspeakable Loki.  
He pushed his brother's head gently, back and forth, to brush his palate and reach and touch his uvula. He kept it slow, trying to delay the climax, lost on the pure adhesion that spread through Loki's mouth. When finally he shed himself in him, calmly, again moaning his name, and felt him shiver softly, his mouth stay there, fully committed not to miss even the smallest bead, he melted down in tenderness and loved him more than ever.  
Loki kept him in his mouth for a while longer, reluctant to come off; then, as attentive and keen as he started, little by little, drew with his lips his way back along Thor's body, his tongue talking again to Thor's skin and soul, sliding from his groin up to his chest. _Did I make my feelings clear? _To his throat._ You are the one. _To his lips._ And only. _  
Nuzzling back on Thor's knees, Loki rested on his lips long enough to make himself sure his kiss tasted more sweet than mead, more sincere than a little girl's first one. And waved on the clear impression that the poets, and writers, and philosophers, and historians all around were smiling upon him from the sweet cages of all their books above. Only then, slowly, he opened his eyes into his brother's, no more impudence in them, just a light, far shadow of resentfulness.  
"Please, Thor." He held his brother's head, grazing his stubble with his thumbs, tenderly. "Don't make me feel like you still can't trust me with your heart. Please."  
As Thor saw two tiny tears welling up at the borders of his eyes, "Oh, come here", he stammered, and grasped him in his arms. And kept him there for an endless while.  
"So, how does it end?" he asked at some point, lazily playing with the black silk of his hair.  
Loki wrinkled his eyebrows.  
"What?"  
"The story. The two brave and gorgeous warriors. Do they fight glorious battles, do they celebrate their victories? I mean, banquets, wine, songs… and of course… sex?" He chuckled. "I understand they're just mortals, but somehow they reminded me… the two of us."  
With a light smile, Loki jutted down from his knees to pick the book up from the floor. He held it in his hands without opening it, almost devotedly, like he was holding some unknown little treasure.   
"I'll tell you… some other time."_

 __"Me! me!" he cried- "turn all your swords alone  
On me- the fact confess'd, the fault my own.   
He neither could nor durst, the guiltless youth:   
Ye moon and stars, bear witness to the truth!   
His only crime (if friendship can offend)   
Is too much love to his unhappy friend."  
Too late he speaks: the sword, which fury guides,   
Driv'n with full force, had pierc'd his tender sides.   
Down fell the beauteous youth: the yawning wound   
Gush'd out a purple stream, and stain'd the ground.   
His snowy neck reclines upon his breast,   
Like a fair flow'r by the keen share oppress'd;   
Like a white poppy sinking on the plain,   
Whose heavy head is overcharg'd with rain. __

_Closing his eyes on his brother's neck and heedless of the people still frozen away in some non-existence level, Loki snuggled up to Thor and called a warm, scented fog to cloak them both.  
He just nodded at Thor's "…feeling a bit hungry… don't you either?", trying to drive the memory of that Midgardian story's end away._

**Clearing.  
The mist was clearing.  
As was his mind.  
Waiting.  
While waiting, listening.  
To the distant shadow of Thor's voice.  
To his memories.**

**_Despair, and rage, and vengeance justly vow'd,  
Drove Nisus headlong on the hostile crowd.   
Volscens he seeks; on him alone he bends:   
Borne back and bor'd by his surrounding friends,   
Onward he press'd, and kept him still in sight;   
Then whirl'd aloft his sword with all his might:   
Th' unerring steel descended while he spoke,   
Piered his wide mouth, and thro' his weazon broke._ **

Thor got slightly back from the warm wave of his memories, feeling his sleeping Loki's breath getting a bit faster.  
 _Words are powerful. Sometimes, even more powerful than a mighty hammer._  
"You see," he whispered on his eyebrows "I need you to wake up, because I want to know how it ends." His voice got softer. "And I didn't tell you in words that time, but… I do now. Even if I'm sure you already know. I trust you with my life, little one. And with my heart. I ever will."  
He couldn't be aware of it yet, but at that same time the news broke in on Asgard through Heimdall's all-seeing.   
Some never seen before Evil's incarnation was spreading death across the Nine Realms, burning to Hel every living thing found on its way.

**Shapes, taking form, all around.  
Still blurred.  
But in some twisted way, _familiar_.  
"You really thought. You could erase. The darkness from your heart. So easily. Loki?"  
Anguish.  
As he started realizing the vastness of his doom.  
Again, he forced his voice out.  
"Show yourself!"  
A grin.  
"You don't. Need to. Ask. While you are. Here."  
Rage, when he heard the laugh. Contemptuous.  
"Sleep. Loki. Dream. And just. Be here."  
He raised his spear, turning around, to everywhere.  
"Where is… _here_?"  
Silence.  
"Loki."  
Silence.  
"Here. Is just. _Elsewhere_."**

_Dying, he slew; and, stagg'ring on the plain,  
With swimming eyes he sought his lover slain;   
Then quiet on his bleeding bosom fell,   
Content, in death, to be reveng'd so well._

Shoved back, roughly, his eyes wide open in a gasp, breathless, all the darkness still there.  
Thor's jump of astonishment under his body. His arms tightened around his waist.  
Loki could not restrain his sudden tears. Unwilled, unmeant. In his mind, nothing else.  
"They die together, Thor," he sighed, trying to catch some other images beyond those final lines. Uselessly. "They die. They… die."


	5. Into The Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The darkness takes him over,  
> The sickness pulls him in;  
> His eyes – a blown out candle,  
> I wish to go with him.  
> Sometimes I see a flicker –  
> A light that shone from them;  
> I hold him to me tightly,  
> Before he’s gone again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time to say a few words about the keys that lead me in writing this story. Given that my Thor and Loki love each other unconditionally and no matter what, what I most care about when I write of them is their feelings, their mental action and interaction, together with the whole universe of – sometimes twisted - pleasure and emotion that opens wide in front of my eyes when I envisage them making love. That is what matters to me, far more than fights and battles and whatever else the canon background could involve. 
> 
> The little precious poem I quote in this chapter is by [Lang Leav](http://www.facebook.com/mslangleav) and it is called “Saving him”.

‘Day one.  
Loki has been awake for about a couple of hours. He’s still blind. It looks like he can’t remember anything about his sleep. He’s so weak. So defenceless. So desolate. He almost didn’t speak, not even to me. He refused to eat. Now he’s fallen asleep again. I can’t leave his side, I know I’m needed for that beast issue, but I just can’t leave him alone. I’m forcing my rage down, under control, because if it were up to me I’d already be there, on Jotunheim, to make them taste to the full the wrath of a god. But I know I have to wait. For Loki’s best, I have to wait.  
Things in our lives are changing so fast, and so deeply. And priorities. He is my priority, now. I hope he can feel me. While he’s sleeping, I hope he can feel my strength. My warmth, my breath. My thoughts. My feelings. I wish I could do more, but I don’t know what exactly to do, not yet. So, I’m doing something weird. Something I didn’t do I don’t remember since when. I’m writing. For him. For my little one. He likes reading, he likes it so much. And I want him to read these words that I’m writing, when his sight recovers. I want to give him a story, this time. My story, our story, as it happens from now until he will be able to see again. I’m not sure I’m capable to put the right words together to make him shiver with all those feelings like he does when he’s reading his books, but I’ll try, and I’ll do it at my heart’s best.  
A while ago they came to tell me that the monster apparently disappeared from Heimdall’s all-seeing in the right moment Loki opened his eyes. They didn’t dare to talk openly to me, but I saw it in their eyes, they are already sure there is a connection between that evil thing’s apparition and Loki’s magic sleep. Maybe that is the incantation the Jotun casted on him. And maybe I’m not so used to deal with incantations, but on one thing I’m sure: one day they’ll have to pay for this, and when that day comes, there will be no mercy.’

**In his dreams.  
There he remembered he saw that twisted place. In his childish dreams.  
And nightmares.  
It was like Asgard, but it wasn’t Asgard. And it resembled Jotunheim, but it wasn’t Jotunheim.  
Rain, frost rain. Wind. Sun. Fog.  
 _Why isn’t it snowing? I like it so much when it snows._  
It wasn’t real, it could not be real. But it tasted so real.  
“It is. Real. Loki.”  
 _No. This is a dream. My dream. It can’t be real._  
“ _Elsewhere_ is different. For everyone. Loki.”  
Walking warily on a frozen bridge that recalled the Bifrost, but it was not the Bifrost. Ending nowhere. He felt so lost.  
“This is _your_ Elsewhere. Loki.”  
 _I’m sleeping. On Asgard. I’m sure of that._  
“Are you? Loki?” A chuckle, still unseen. “Come. See. Come.”  
Disturbing, the landscape around.  
Constantly shifting from shape to shape.   
Like his feelings.  
Rain, frost rain. On his feelings.  
 _I can feel you. My sweetest. Stay… stay._  
At the end of the bridge, a misty rift. An improbable window opened on the other side.  
“Look. Loki.”  
And through that window, he saw.  
“I assume you recognize. What you see.”  
His heart froze. His breath stopped. His eyes petrified.  
As he understood everything.**

_Nifelheim.  
A pleasantly wide, lonesome, iced place to walk, for him who could not share any part of his existence with any living creature in any Realm. But still, too empty. Too little life to drain. He was now growing huger and together with that his hunger grew, grew his urge, and grew his lust for blood. Grew his curiosity. He was now starting to feel a foggy purpose in his being _there _. New unpredictable skills in his unstable inner being. Most unforeseen thing of all, he now began to catch random emotions from the creatures he came across and killed.  
Trees, plants and bushes spread tears of dust while being plundered of their meagre drop of life. Insects squeaked in grey, almost inaudibly. Bigger animals snuffled their life out with a black growl of anger. More evolved creatures dripped blue stones of fear dented with surprise. And Aesir… Aesir flooded gore clouds of stinging arrogance, mixed with the fire of bravery and with the golden spice of godhood. On every new prey he sucked up life from, he now wasted an instant more, listening to the different way it shifted from _alive _to_ dead _. Actually not being able to understand the difference between_ alive _and_ dead _.  
Because he was not meant to understand that difference, Hel was beyond his reach: not that he cared, for he didn’t need to walk along a Realm where vacant, unsubstantial souls were the only things moving. And, as Nifelheim was not the right land to lead him to his _purpose _, neither was Hel.  
Nor was Svartalfheim, even if that smoky Realm turned out more appealing. At least, more living things walking on it. Though not so satisfying. Not as the Aesir. Those Svartalfheim’s dark creatures were way too weak to satiate him. They even tried to stop him, poor little things, and they called for help, when he showed up in their biggest city excising lives around, as carelessly as a plough cutting the new born flowers on a meadow that was intended to be just sowed with nettles.   
Death after death, his urge still kept growing. Beyond his hunger, his instinct was now screaming for a light, a frozen light, calling him from afar. He had no clue of what that was, from where it was occurring, nor why or how. He couldn’t. He was not meant to. Only one thing he knew, he had to follow instinct. And instinct was pulling him after that distant light, upwards across the Nine Realms.  
Towards Asgard._

The next few days, nothing essentially changed.  
Loki was completely at the mercy of that magic sleep that caught him randomly and all of a sudden, never at the same time, never for the same length, preventing him not only from a fast recovery – at least on the physical side -, but also from thinking clearly. Each time, after waking up, he looked more and more dismayed and incapable to control his own reactions. He was barely talking, still not eating, and getting weaker day by day.   
Most of the times he came back to their room when Loki was awake, Thor found him crying. Silently, sorely, nuzzled into his darkness, like he was relentlessly losing himself into that doom. Until someone, the healers or the sorcerers, had found a solution to that heinous spell, the only thing Thor could do was trying to comfort him. As he did, wholeheartedly, with his presence, with his touch, with his words, with his silences. Nevertheless, he could not avoid feeling a sombre distress running constantly under his skin, due to the fear that the spell could not be broken, making Loki’s condition irreversible.  
Also that afternoon, when he got back to him after having been summoned by Odin, Thor couldn’t hold a surge of anguish. He left Loki sleeping and now he was awake, standing still near the window pane, wrapped up in a blanket, his face pointing outside, his eyelids closed, like he was trying to catch at least with his skin the light of the sky and the colours of the sunset. A frozen alabaster sculpture, creating which the artist caught the ultimate look of dismay. Tremendously beautiful, as he always was, even if he was starting to look skinner, and even if his beauty now tasted more tormented than ever.   
“How are you feeling?” Thor asked in a whisper, getting closer to him.  
Loki didn’t move a muscle, not even his mouth’s to answer him. From beneath the blanket, a small white corner of his chest was peeking out, and the smooth wheezing that ruffled it was the only evidence that Loki was alive. After a long while, a sarcastic smile showed up on his face, still aimed to the horizon he couldn’t actually see.  
“So,” he said tauntingly “you went to see the All-Father, didn’t you?” He sniggered. “To hear his invaluable advices on how to deal with the new troubles his foster child is causing to the Realm.”  
Thor shook his head, perfectly knowing how that was going to end.  
“Loki…”  
He reached his hand out to touch his shoulder, but Loki budged, slowly turning his head in the direction he guessed Thor’s face was.  
“No, no, no, please. Tell me what the All-Father said. Come on.”  
Thor took a long breath, pierced by the overwhelming angst he felt in Loki’s voice, that uttermost angst he had almost forgotten and that now cut his stomach like an ulcer.  
“Fine,” he mumbled, looking into the leading-nowhere transparency of his brother’s improbable eyes. Then he threw up the words as if he was spitting a cancer out of his mouth. “He said there is a link between you and that beast, because it’s a given that it shows up exactly when you fall asleep. He said you’re now a threat, and that it’s not possible you don’t remember anything when you wake up, because of the capabilities of your mind. So, he said you must be hiding something. He said that due to the spell they casted on you there is the real chance your Jotun part will take over eventually, forcing you to act against Asgard again. He said he caught a tremor from the Casket of Ancient Winters and he’s sure it comes from you. For that he wanted to restrain you, but I warned him not to do that, or... He also said the beast will not survive the power of Mjolnir, so he’s sending me to fight it the next time it shows up. And while I’m away he’s going to lock you up in this room and put guards at the door, to avoid any further risk.”  
Loki’s lips seethed, his breath got faster, and when his voice came out Thor felt the cutting echo of the ancient, twisted hatred that moved Loki’s life towards madness ages before. And that until that moment he thought it had been erased forever.  
“Ah, that he stated. That arrogant old fossil. Always acting as if he were the only one carrying the revealed truth… He assumes he is the Almighty, the Omniscient, the Absolute Ruler in the whole known universe. Without realizing, in his selfish, poor petty mind, he’s even blinder than me.”  
He cinically shook his head.  
“I wonder why he brought me here from the beginning, given that he always saw me as a threat.”  
Deep inside his heart, Thor knew he was right. But in spite of that, he could not hold his words back.  
“You can’t say that. He raised you as a father would do.”  
There, Loki abruptly blew up.  
“But he is not!” he yelled on Thor’s face, his blanket slipped down, freeing his skin. “ _My_ father!”  
He snarled in the dark, grasping the air randomly until he caught the first things handy and threw them blindly against his own invisible demons. Thor flinched, too late to contain his little brother’s wild fit of rage, for he didn’t expect such a deranged reaction after days of almost utter stillness in Loki’s mind and body. For an instant, he feared everything they treasured together until then was about to be lost.  
“Why did he take me from Jotunheim?!” Loki shouted, raving, groping around as if he wanted to destroy anything his hands could reach. “Why?!” He escaped Thor’s grasp, he stumbled, grabbed the edge of the desk and overturned it, crying all his tears out as the tangle of bane he kept locked inside his soul could not be controlled any longer.  
“He’s going to lock me up?! Is he?!” Again he screamed, his neck’s veins swelled, his whole body was quivering untidily. “Where am I supposed to go, huh?” His face was a mask of frenzy. “I can’t see a fucking thing, I can barely stand on my feet, I can’t even put my fucking thoughts together!”  
He laughed hysterically between the pangs of tears, Thor grabbed his arms, tried to curb him, befuddled, Loki wiggled out, fell backwards on the floor, trudged getting up again.  
“Why! Didn’t they! Kill me!”   
“Loki.” Thor forced himself not to yield to his brother’s prostration. “I won’t let you fall into madness.” Not to break into tears as well. “Not again.”  
“What?” Loki yelled, his breath broken by his agonizing sobs. “How do you dare talking of madness?” His misty, hallucinated eyes trembling towards nowhere over Thor’s head. “Have you ever tried what madness is like?” His throat burning in pain. “Have you?!”  
He let a scream out, as Thor finally managed to grab him from behind, grasping his wrists and holding them tightly against his breast, his face sunk in his brother’s hair. Loki kept wriggling, and ranting, till his mad shout faded slowly into a heartbreaking crying. He bowed downwards, gripped in his brother’s stranglehold, so twiggy and frail that Thor was afraid he could bust into dust.  
“Loki. Stop it.”  
Loki coughed, and spitted, his desperate weeping throes were tearing him apart and stabbing Thor’s heart to death. Thor felt his little brother was right on the ragged edge, he knew Loki didn’t need much more to fall down forever. Using violence on his own self he kept his mind clear and didn’t let despair take over his soul.   
“You’re scaring me, Loki.” He softened his grip, his lips on his brother’s ear, his eyes closed. “Stop it, already.”  
He made him turn around, gently, holding him stoutly in his arms, to force him to remember he was still there, no matter what. Loki dropped his head on the embracing womb of his brother’s chest, unable to control his crying. Thor’s mouth leant on his hair.  
“Please, little one.” He scratched his nape, lightly, like he was grazing a kitten’s tiny neck. “Don’t make things harder.” And he sighed mildly on his head, feeling his brother’s anguish at last slackening a bit. “Please.”  
Little by little, Loki re-emerged from his abyss of blindness, his face still pressed on Thor’s bosom, his eyes still flooding tears. But his voice now sounded softer, raspy from the crazy screaming, and dreadfully, endlessly grieved.  
“Th-Thor… forgive me, Thor… I… I didn’t mean to…”  
Thor took his head in his hands and made him raise his face, to lean a soft little kiss on his lips.  
“Shush. It’s alright.” And he kissed him again, shivering at the salty taste of his tears. “It’s alright.”  
Loki sniffled, helpless like a child who just lost his leading hand, deep sobs still stirring his chest.  
“I… just can’t… I c-can’t… I’m… scared…”  
“I know, little one.” Thor kissed the tears away from his cheeks. “And I need you to trust me. I’ll rather die than give up with all that is happening.” From his lids. “I don’t care what Odin says.” From the corners of his eyes. “Or thinks.” From his nose. “Or does.” From his mouth. “I’ll never, ever let him hurt you.” From his chin. “Or take you from me.” From the small, cold hollow of his throat. “Or decide in my place what I have to do with my life.” From the still pulsating veins on his dainty neck. “Or with yours.” His fingers ran smoothly on his brother’s forehead. “Not anymore.” On his shoulders, that shivered innocently. “Our lives are just… ours.” On the mother-of-pearl of his chest. “And nothing else, nothing… but you… is my life.”  
Again, he covered Loki’s mournful little face with a hundred tiny kisses, he lingered on his lips a bit longer, his thumbs slightly grazing his brother’s cheekbones, until he felt him relaxing. He sighed with relief when Loki put his arms around his waist, laying his cheek on his shoulder, and breathed softly on his neck.   
“I’m glad…” Thor’s cosy warmth drove him back slowly from his madness to a more and more endurable reality, where the only bad feeling left in the overwhelming darkness was that deep, crushing impotence, still there to make him feel the weakest creature in the world. “I’m glad he’s not my father.” So reassuring, after that havoc, Thor’s hands tenderly stroking his back. “And I’m glad he took me from Jotunheim.” He just rested in his brother’s cuddle, blaming his own self because he almost forgot what that cuddle was made of. “For… if he didn’t…” It was made of heavenly strength, and sparkling fondness, and crystal commitment. “…I wouldn’t have you, now…” It was made of the most simple, ordinary feeling in the universe, and yet – since they were the _not_ simple, _not_ ordinary two who shared it - the most unique and powerful. It was made of _love_.  
He took a deep, long sigh right on his brother’s mouth, surrendering to the refreshing scent of Thor’s breath. He tried to chase every deadly shadow away from his head, drawing Thor’s homey lips in his mind while moistening them slightly with his own. Just his tears, forced for too long to be compressed inside him, still could not be choked back.  
“Oh, Thor… I need… to see you… I need it… so much…”  
Thor drove his brother’s hands up to his face and made them outline his profile, mildly, until they ran on his features on their own.  
“You can see me through your touch,” he whispered. “And soon, through your eyes again, I promise.”  
Everything now was slowly floating into a renewed calmness, on Thor’s fingers running through his little brother’s hair, on his nose soaking the enlivening scent spreading from that coffer of grievous wonders that his Loki was; and in that calmness, shading into the tones of unreal, Loki’s tears quietly became sighs, and sighs became strokes, and strokes became kisses.   
Then, suddenly, on the pale whisper of their sparking excitement, Loki chilled and unlocked his lips from his brother’s, his breath hastened again, again a mask of scare seized his face. He grabbed Thor’s shoulders, trembling, panting. Weeping again, helplessly.  
“It comes again, Thor…” His head heavier and heavier. “…the sleep… please, please, Thor…” His legs collapsed, Thor held him up. “…don’t let it come, Thor, help me…” His voice faded away in a low, racking sob. “…Th…”  
And he was lifeless, all at once, in his brother’s arms. Thor whined with impotence, picking him up and clinging him to his chest, unable to make the slightest movement for an eternal instant. Then he laid him on their bed, thoughtfully, and just sat there at his side, his mind blank under the burden of a situation he was starting to see as actually unmanageable. His eyes kept peering at Loki’s sleeping face, until he finally let his silent tears come out together with his anguish, unseen, unheard, unbearable in the deep blue stillness that wrapped up the room.  
After a while, he moved his sight around and saw his notebook, dumped on the floor together with the stuff that fell from the overturned desk and broke into pieces. He picked it up and held it in his hands, the rarest journal one could think about, on which – with a much greater effort than he’d ever imagined - he had already fixed seven days of his life. He raised the table up and leant that little precious on it, safe, together with all that it meant; how easily, while doing that, clarity, self-confidence and resolution took their right place back in his heart, gave him a hit of renewed strength. Among the other things, Odin told him that Alflyse, the queen of Svartalfheim, asked for their help against the evil beast, and he could not delay his duties as an Aesir any longer. At least, as long as that would mean doing Loki’s good as well. He powerfully grabbed Mjolnir and bent his head on his brother’s mouth, he smiled on him.  
“Time to take a stand, my little sleeping one.” A flash of hesitancy, at the idea of leaving him like that. Tamed at once. “I’ll be back soon. And with that monster’s head.”  
He kissed him on his forehead, before he left the room.  
Outside the door, he found two Odin’s guards already there. He stopped right in front of them, a few inches from their nose, he stuck into their pupils the cutting blade of his gaze, that didn’t blink, not once.  
“Listen carefully, both of you.” His voice was carrying the power of thunder itself. “Just leave him alone until I come back.” He gritted his teeth, as he measured his words and the tone of his voice to make it as daunting as he could. “And don’t. Dare. To touch him.” The lightning of his look still fixed into their eyes. “Because I won’t think twice about snapping your neck, if you do.”

**He painfully forced his voice out, without turning back.  
Even when he felt another shape finally taking form behind him.  
Huge.  
“Not only you took all my powers.” His hand tightened around his spear. “You gathered them into that thing. And you gave them… life.”  
“Yes. Loki. But. I would better say. All your _darkest_ powers.”  
He let a scream of rage out, he turned around, perfectly knowing what he was going to see.  
He swung his spear forward, piercing thin air through the enormous figure towering over him. Dark, cold. And sneering.  
Giant. Frost giant. Not one he remembered he saw before.  
Or rather, _many_ he remembered he saw before. Melted in one.  
“While you sleep, you are seized _here_. Loki. And _it_ walks _there_.”  
His panting echoed through the improbable land that surrounded him.  
“You can do nothing. Loki. Except. Watch.”  
The giant grinned.  
“Watch your other self. Dooming your Realms to death.”  
Watch.  
The lightning of Mjolnir.  
His heart throbbed.  
“Watch your unaware god. Being taunted like the last of the morons.”  
In his eyes, a veil of tears.  
Suddenly, _there_ , Thor.   
Glorious. Magnificent.  
Standing as the living incarnation of upmost handsomeness, and might, and lust.  
Carrying the dazzling brightness of their love in front of his Nemesis.**

_Different.  
This one was different.  
He came with the glare of lightening and with the clap of thunder, he came from the sky, roaring, and the whole land quaked when his feet touched the ground.  
Delightfully Aesir, but amazingly unique. Excelling, not only among the scanty dark beings of Svartalfheim, also among his fellow Aesir brothers. Taller. Mightier. His muscles shouted out his stamina together with his deity.  
The Aesir gods could not be killed just with one glance. They were the only living creatures who needed to be attacked in order to be slain. That was the thing that made their heart so… tasty. This one was even more.  
He snarled with excitement, his drool poured on the ground, his eyes lit up with irrepressible greed.  
That Aesir god was such a challenge. And challenge fired up his craving.  
So powerful. So rabid. So tempting.  
And yet, as he got close enough to be sniffed, so… unexpected.   
His smell.   
His smell tasted…_ familiar.

**“He is not realizing. What he is facing. How funny. Is it not?”  
 _My treasured. I should be there. Fighting. At your side._  
“Do you think if he knew. He would still share. All those sentiments. With you, Loki?”  
 _That_ thing _is not part of me anymore. I’ve changed._ He _made me change._  
He ground, flinging green arrows of rage through his gaze into the giant’s eyes.  
“Maybe you did me a favour, instead. I will finally be able to erase that part of me once and for all, when I’ll destroy that creature.”  
Cruel, mocking, the laughter of the giant.  
“It is not up to you. To destroy anything. Loki. You can not even. Get close enough. To your other self.”  
Gasping.  
“For you are _here_. When other you is _there_. And when you are _there_. Other you is _elsewhere_.”  
Confusion.  
“And you will not take back any memory. Of all this. When you wake up. _There_.”  
Anger.  
“That thing is _not_ me.”  
Again, the giant sneered.  
“It is. Loki. More than you can. Ever. Imagine.”**

_The instant their glances cut across froze the whole land in an eternal, motionless in-between, together with all the life around. And in that instant, he had the strongest hunch that god meant something. Even if ‘meaning’ was not a concept he could get. All around the mighty body of the Aesir, he clearly smelled_ the light _. How, he could not tell; but nonetheless he felt his_ purpose _closer. An instant later, he heard the Aesir screaming out some words; suddenly the other warriors nearby, Aesir and not, a while before frozen into the stillness his crazy eyes had forced on them, moved some steps back, leaving the two of them alone on the field, looming over each other.  
They jumped at the same time against one another, his jaws rabidly gaping, the Aesir’s hammer crackling with a rumbling burst of lightning. The clash made the ground tremble. His claws ripped the armour on the god’s chest, he foretasted his baffling blood, but the light darts the god threw against him bumped him on the ground. His rage exploded, he shook his head ferociously, he jumped again, growling, the Aesir swung his hammer and hit him again, again they both fell down, again they lunged at each other, both somehow stunned by the mutual inability to deliver the crucial blow. As though some higher force prevented them from ending the fight, that became ruthless, and  chaotic, and gory, till…_

**_Wake up.  
Wake up.  
Wake up._  
A growl, this time, from the giant.  
A growl of vexation.  
 _Wake up.  
Save him.  
Save us_.**

_…a sudden violent tug, come from nowhere, inescapable, and he was roughly pulled off to_ elsewhere.

‘Day nine.  
The more I write, the easier it gets. I wonder why I didn’t do this for such a long time. It’s a nice way to give vent to emotions when you can’t do it by mouth. Loki is sleeping again now, but he was awake when I came back from the fight. I was so burning. So enraged. I couldn’t slaughter that monster before it vanished from my sight. I guess Loki felt my mood even if he couldn’t see the rage on my face. I’m sure he did. We spoke a bit. I told him I felt weird when my eyes stopped into the creature’s. For a short moment I had the gut feeling there was something more behind, I can’t figure out what. Except it’s one of the most powerful, ruthless, hellish demons I ever fought against. And most of all, I actually can’t understand how that twisted being could survive the power of Mjolnir, since it’s not godly offspring. Or at least, I assume it isn’t. Loki kind of didn’t know what to say. Still, he can’t remember anything when he wakes up, but now he is sure that something’s going on between his sleep and that monster; he’s even more dejected, for he can’t understand it, or manage it, nor do anything to help.   
When I look at him, I see the depth of his frustration. Of his weariness, of his resignation. I told him the healers are working on a potion to recover his sight, they’re almost there, in a few days we will know if it works. They’re confident, I’m confident. I need to be confident. Because I need to have him back as he was before everything happened. Or I will lose my mind.   
There are some other things, some little things, however, that keep my hopes alive. After almost ten days, today I made him eat. I was eating in front of him, and at some point I boosted him to take the food directly from my mouth. A morsel of meat, a strawberry, a grape. A sip of ale. He did it, it was a sort of little game, a bit of fun, it made him smile. I was so happy that I saw him smiling, even if for a short while. It had been ages since the last time he did. I told him he must regain his strength, so we can fight together soon. Together, I am sure of that, we can just win.   
But then, again, he fell asleep.  
It’s quite late now, and he’s still sleeping. I’m going to get some sleep as well. I’ll sleep next to him, as always. Holding him in my arms, as always. Breathing his breath and living on the pulse of his heart. As always. And as I always will.’

**Night.  
Moonless night.  
And in that night, the tangible echo of Thor’s soul.  
 _I know you never left me. I know you’re here. Even if you’re there._  
He could see peeve in the giant’s eyes, burning into his.  
“You are stronger. Than we expected. Loki.”  
Deadlock.  
“Your mind. Is stronger. Than we foresaw.”  
 _Why are you telling me this? Is that a trick?_  
“No trick. Loki. Because anyway. What has been done. Cannot be undone.”  
Silence.  
The giant’s gaze, cold fire, overwhelming him.  
“Unless.”**

‘Day fifteen.  
Everything we started to believe that could get better suddenly crumbled again. The potion didn’t work. Loki just crushed. I don’t know what held me from unchaining my rage against the healers, they swore they’d fixed it in three days at most, but I was about to kill them. And I’m still here on Asgard, and not on Jotunheim bringing Loki with me, just because Odin sent a dozen of his guards to stop us on the Bifrost before we could reach Heimdall. I didn’t dare to slay twelve of my people. Next time, I am not sure I will be strong enough to restrain myself so easily.  
Leastwise, it looks like Loki now can keep himself awake for longer time, even though this seems to consume his strength; I want to think he’s gradually retrieving at least his mind skills, it would be so encouraging for him.  
Today he asked me to read him something, some poetry, because – he said – poetry has the power to make your inner self fly over the mere dreariness of hard facts. I picked one of his books, “Poems from the Nine Realms”. I felt a bit awkward, I’m not so good at reading, but when I began Loki gifted me with a soft smile, and that was enough to warm my heart up. Until, flipping through the pages, I came across that little poem. It’s called… “Saving You”. Again, Midgardian. When I started reading it, I just… I heard my voice… trembling. I could not help it.   
_The darkness takes him over,  
       The sickness pulls him in;  
       His eyes – a blown out candle,  
       I wish to go with him.  
Sometimes I see a flicker –   
       A light that shone from them;  
       I hold him to me tightly,  
       Before he’s gone again._  
Now I understand. I understand how written words can touch one’s soul. I understand how my little one feels when he reads. This poem is just me in this right moment. It’s us. I can’t believe someone so far from us, someone who never even knew we are here, could feel the same as us and catch these feelings in such a flawless way. I saw tears welling up in his eyes, while I was reading. And I’m sure he felt mine through my voice. He groped for my hand, he held it on his cheek, closing his eyes, just that. No words at all. Just that.’

 _Beyond the Sea of Space, across the Glowing Desert, he overstepped Skornheim, and Gundersheim, and Nidavellir, on his blind way to_ the light _. Again they tried to stop him, again they sent warriors and even sorcerers, but they just attained the opposite: thanks to their hearts, thanks to their energy and their power, he could get huger, stronger, smarter… and send to Hel even a bigger amount of them than he expected.  
Finally, when he smelled the proximity of Asgard, every single cell in his body boiled with unrestrained prurience.  
But again that undecipherable Aesir god showed up, making the whole land rumbling, and forced him to stop at the foot of the mountains._

‘Day nineteen.  
I was back from seeing Odin and the others. They’re worried. I am worried too, for it looks like that thing really can’t be killed. I found Loki crouched up in a corner of the room, half dressed, crying. I was not able to say a word, my heart just… snapped. I nuzzled next to him, took him in my arms, cuddled him. “Is it snowing outside? I like it so much when it snows…” he just said. “I wasn’t even able… to put my clothes on.” And grabbed my hands, sobbing. I can’t even imagine what is like living in that utter darkness, so powerless, so lost. I could feel the deadly chasm of his despair right in my veins, and bones, and soul. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put into words how hurting that is. For me. I couldn’t, I can’t conceive how much more it must be for him. And I can’t stand seeing him like that for any longer. Why all this, why? Didn’t he endure enough pain already? Why it looks like the only thing he has left when he’s awake is crying? Didn’t he cry enough for his past sins? I held him in my arms, I kissed him, again I told him not to worry, and that I’m going to fix all things. I was sincere, I am sincere. I will fix all things. But I’m not sure he believed me. I am not even sure I believe myself, after I failed killing that doomed creature twice.  
I couldn’t keep watching in his sightless eyes, those gloomy, pleading eyes. Those eyes awash with all the sadness of the universe. Those eyes that I adore. I kissed him again, he kissed me back. We melted our tongues together, and our fingers, and our skin. We loved on the floor, I told him “Let’s pretend we are in our secret little glade near Yggdrasil.” His body was so cold. We hadn’t loved since the night I took him back from Jotunheim, he is too weak, and downhearted, and most of the time caught in that exhausting sleep. I was so missing him. His touch, his lips, his shivers under my hands, his little moans of pleasure. He gave himself to me so sweetly, so innocently. So frailly. And when I took him, I tried to be more delicate than I’ve ever been. I still can’t find the words to say the feelings he can unleash in me, not only when we make love, no, even when I just think of him. I don’t know if he realized, but… while I was inside him and felt him close to coming… I cried. For there’s only one thing that now I can think to care about: I want to see him happy, and painless, and peaceful, and totally gratified just because of our love. As he would be, if he just could. And as would I. We spent millennia fighting, together, against each other, and killing enemies, and leading wars for other people’s sake. Now I only wish we both could live just on our love. I know he wishes the same. Is that too a petty thing to ask, for two like us who were born gods?’

**All of a sudden, in his _elsewhere_ , a second presence.  
Subtle, blurry. And powerful.  
Keeping itself concealed.  
“Trust in your strength.”  
Pale foggy words.  
“You still can.”  
Directly into his brain.  
“You have to go.”  
 _Go where?_  
“You have to go.”  
Too far into the mist to get more of that speech.  
 _I have to go_.**

When he came back from the healers, Thor was a tangle of eagerness, carrying in his hands the phial with the right mixture to recover his little brother’s sight. _Can’t wait to see you seeing me again, can’t wait to see you smiling at my smile. We will re-write history as though nothing of all this had ever happened._  
He burst into their room, “Loki!”, rising his hand with the vial, “…Loki?”, he stood still just in the middle, his breath cut. His heart stopped. His mind, dead.  
 _Loki._  
The heaviest silence ever.  
As he could put at least some of the pieces of his severed thoughts together again, he saw.  
On the pillow at the head of their empty bed, his journal, opened back-to-front on the last page.  
And on that page, halting, Loki’s handwriting.


	6. The last tile to perfection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Here is nowhere and everywhere. Here is never and always. Nothing can touch us, while we are here. Let’s keep the whole rest outside. Just… for a while longer.”
> 
>  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, they really needed some rest. Some cuddling. Some good cheerful, alluring… diversion. And here they have it. Together with some… new intriguing experience.

_‘Thor. My sweetest Thor.  
When you’ll read this, I will be gone. Don’t go mad, please, there is no reason to. I don’t mean to hurt you, I never even could just think to hurt you. Never.  
I found this notebook on the desk. This journal. Your journal. Full of all those priceless words you wrote for me. I gathered all the strength I have left to grab your words through the dark out of this notebook, Heimdall from his dome helped me to do it, and now he is helping me to write mine down. You made me cry. And I’m still crying, while I’m trying to write this little out from my darkness. I can’t believe you wrote for me. You wrote… for me. Can you even begin to imagine how much this means to me? If you were here, now, I’d grab you in my arms and never let you go.   
I wish to write to you all the words unwritten, I wish to tell you all the words unspoken. But I don’t have much time, for I don’t know when that damn sleep is going to catch me again.  
I thought I lost myself to darkness, during these weeks. And I became so blind I almost forgot where my true strength lays. It lays just here, just next to me. In me. It always did, it always will.   
It’s you. It’s us.’_  
Sitting on the side of their bed, Thor could distinctly hear his little brother’s voice while he was reading. Still unable to make his mind and thoughts clear, he just tried to control the random storm of feelings rumbling in his soul.  
 _‘You are my treasured one. I can’t think of a life without you anymore. Because there isn’t one. I was so lost. In this blackness. In this impotence. In these living nightmares I fall into and I can’t control, or remember, or avoid. I was really on the brink of giving up. Then your words come. Written for me. And make me wake up. You make me wake up, and I don’t mean from the sleep. I mean you make my heart jump, and my soul shiver, and my mind shout.  
So, now I have to go. Heimdall will also help me to leave the palace avoiding Odin’s guards. He is all-seeing. He can see through the future. For that, I guess he also sees where rightness stands. And so do I. There is no-one else in the worlds I care about besides you, but I can’t keep on feeling Odin’s hatred burdening me. Burdening us. I know that bottom line he’s right. I know it’s me, it’s all because of me, it’s always been, it always will. And I want it to be no more. I have to put an end to it. Not for the All-Father, not for Asgard, or the Nine Realms. For us. So that we can live on, my one and only, just on our love. Just as you said. Because it’s not too a petty thing to ask, no, on the contrary, it’s the most essential. Because I want it, because you want it, and nothing else matters.’_  
Tears in his eyes, fire in his heart, Thor grazed the page as if it was his little brother’s skin under his fingertips.  
 _‘I know I’d speak uselessly if I’d tell you not to come after me. So, come. Please, come, I want you to come, I need you to come. I’ll be there, waiting. For you. I just need some time before, because there is something I must do and I can do only alone. Heimdall will know where to look for me, I can’t say more here, for Odin might find out. I’m going, now. And Thor, my breath, don’t fret about my still being blind, my horse will see in my place, he knows the way.  
I’m leaving this notebook here for you to read my words, but know this, my sweetest: when I’m back, I’ll treasure it as the most precious jewel until the end of my days.’_

“He had been riding all daylong, toward South.” Heimdall’s iced eyes looked into Thor’s, deadpan. “When he reached the shore on the Sea of Fear, my sight lost him.”  
Thor held the reins back, while his horse’s hoofs pawed the changeling floor of the Bifrost. He dismounted, and moved a few steps to the All-Seer, who was standing, statuesque, on the golden doorway.  
“Is he fine?”  
Heimdall’s eyelids tightened vaguely, catching the anguish in Thor’s voice.   
“He was, until my eyes could follow him. He is stronger than _they_ think.” He rose his sight over Thor’s head, over the purplish clouds that stained the sunset sky. “There is much more at stake than you can be aware of, prince Thor.” Into a future he was the only one able to see. “And he is the key. But I cannot speak further. Not here, not now.”  
Thor chilled at those words, and didn’t dare to add anything back. Then, the Watcher’s eyes fell on the vial that Thor held in his left hand as though he was carrying the juice of life itself.  
“Just know this. For I can see where other people can’t, I can also see he is changed. Because of you, he is changed. As things are meant to change for the Nine Realms. Soon.” His golden sword glared in the dusk of twilight. “But the All-Father cannot see what I see. When he’ll find out that Loki is gone, and you are after him, he will not let it pass so easily.”  
Thor didn’t need an effort to make his own sight more resolute than ever.  
“I do not care.”  
Heimdall just nodded, in a slight movement of his head, at Thor mounting his horse again.  
“Then, go. Go to your cherished one. Bring him his sight back, he needs to have it back. And be both ready for what is going to follow. I will be watching.”  
Thor put the precious vial under his armour, right on his chest, safe, and reined his horse in, for the animal reared when he made him turn around as if he could feel his master’s yen for leaving.   
“And prince Thor.” Heimdall’s voice forced him to contain his ardour for a last, endless instant. “Never doubt of your heart.”  
Thor just turned his head back, a smile on his face, and the brightness of confidence in his eyes.  
“I won’t. The entire Valhalla knows I never will.”

Ages.  
It looked like ages he didn’t enter that forgotten place.   
Lost on the Sea of Fear, there, where in the cold foggy days the slightest rift between dawn and sunset grazed the sheerest of the Pillars of Utgard. There, where a tenuous threshold laid unknown to the most, leading to the gauzy pit only the eyes that burnt in the afterlife could see.   
A place he contrived with his magic, and for that locked from any possible intruder, no matter how powerful. A place of his ultimate own. Built when he was lost in madness, moulded on his craziest ghosts, and cravings, and severed memories. A place where he used to hide himself when rage, and hatred, and shame, and… sorrow became too heavy to bear even for him. He made it so that it could change on his mood, on his dreams, on his nightmares. So that it could shine with wonders, or fill up with monsters, or stiff into ice, or sink into dusk. There was only one door leading in, an invisible door to an invisible palace, and that door needed his breath to be opened.  
Yet, when he moved his first blind step in, Loki instantly felt that all was different.  
He was now sightless, and powerless. He could keep himself awake for a longer time now, but that didn’t change the devastating awareness of his weakness. Even if Thor’s words gave his soul the crucial pull, even if he could clearly feel his mind regaining strength little by little, with no eyes and with no powers there was actually nothing he could do. Nowhere he could go. He could not wait for the healers to find a cure, nor for the sorcerers to break the incantation. If they ever could.  
That forgotten spot of his forgotten life was his only hope.  
He fumbled in the dark, chilling at the smell of past that arrogantly overfilled his nostrils; even if he could not see, he felt that place – too long abandoned and yet so strongly linked to his inmost soul - was silently crumbling into windy dust, fatally affected by the spell that had been casted on its builder.  
 _You used to be so warm to me, my old shelter,_ he thought, shot through by a stream of bitterness. _Can you still catch my inner self? Am I still able to shape you on my feelings?_  
The improbable walls trembled softly at his passage, shedding cold tears of stone on the shadow of his footprints.  
 _Your bleakness was so reassuring to my solitude…_ He smiled through the darkness, touched at the blatancy that now the thought of Thor always came in his mind before everything else. _I could never bear that solitude anymore._ Before the ploy he was determined to try. _And you must not disappoint me._ Because if a ploy existed, it did exist for Thor. _For when he comes for me, I want him to see through you the brilliance he can lighten my soul with._  
Forcing himself not to slip away on his craving for Thor’s touch, and trying not to listen to his sore muscles, he focused on finding in the blackness the right way to the most secret den hidden in that most secret palace. There, aeons before, he locked the echo of his most peculiar powers into a chest made from the twisted whispers that came from his own heart. At the time, he did that just out of spite, to mock his enemies if the chance had come, to be ready to start a war if necessary, or more simply to prove himself his skills. And there, under that chest in that little room that laid concealed among the other rooms, he hid a passageway. From there to somewhere else beyond the Realms, and still inside the Realms. A passage to that veiled string of void connecting and separating all dimensions. That grey area where the custom of time didn’t exist, where everything simply _was_ simultaneously nothing and _wasn’t_. In his former life, it took him all the best of his powers to reach that void and provide for himself the safest hideout, in case he needed one eventually. Then, he _found_ Thor and forgot about all that. As he almost forgot about that whole place. His biggest secret ever. He trembled with delight thinking in a few hours his sweet god would have been the first – and only - to know it.  
 _And only?_  
As he entered the floating lair, he suddenly, clearly felt he was not alone.  
His breath sped up, while he moved a few wavering steps towards the exact point in that unstable  hideaway where he remembered he left his precious chest. And the crystal framework of his brand new hopes crumpled at once, when he reached out a hand and discovered that there was nothing left there but thick air.  
“You should have seen that coming.”  
Loki turned back with a start at that voice’s sound breaking the darkness directly into his mind. That deep, impassive voice he knew so well, but he didn’t expect to hear right there.  
“As they erased your powers, these provisions of yours went along with it, Loki.”  
He twiddled his head from side to side, trying to catch the point from where the voice came. Still too embittered to say a single word, he just stayed there, waiting, and trying to understand.  
“It took me a while to find you here, Loki. You did very good hiding this place. Here is perfect for us to talk safely.”  
 _How…?_ he thought. _Does he already know what I don’t know?_  
He finally forced his voice out, still not sure which direction to steer his words to.  
“Heimdall,” he whispered. “So it was you… in my sleep… telling me I had to come here. The only thing I remember.”  
“Indeed, Loki. I was not sure you could hear me. I am talking to you from my Dome even now, I am not actually here. But here, Odin can’t hear us. Nor can the Jotun.”  
 _What is so crucial, Gate-Keeper?_  
“Why calling me here, yet knowing it would have been useless for me?” Loki’s voice sounded disenchanted. “Are you going to tell me… I really have no hope left?”  
“That is not the point, Loki.” Maybe Heimdall was not there in flesh and blood, but his presence permeated the darkness with leaden stateliness. “I called you here to talk to you. I can see through your feelings. As I can see through your nightmares.”  
Loki shivered at those words, because for the first time since… ever, maybe, he felt a clear emotion in Heimdall’s voice. He felt… concern.  
“That creature is not just linked to you. That creature _is you_ , Loki. It has been shaped on the darkest side of your soul. And being you, it cannot be just killed. Not by Thor, not by Odin, not even by you. It feeds on your sleeps, and it is meant to rebirth every time, even from death.”  
Loki gasped, and faltered, unable to contain the anguish that revelation wreaked on his soul.  
“I cannot let Odin know this,” Heimdall went on. “He would restrain you or even send you to death. The Jotun connive perilous purposes. I can clearly see they are aiming to the Casket, by means of that creature, and that is something the All-Father can see as well. He will never let you live, if he finds out what that creature really is. It would be pointless if I tell him there’s no use in killing it… and even less in killing you by his own hand.”  
Tiny drops of cold sweat beaded Loki’s brow, while the voice of the All-Seer kept talking, almost undaunted.  
“Because you are the only means to stop all this.” Heimdall’s voice now grew somehow imposing. “You, and the one who devoted his whole self to you. Who led you to become what you have become.” _The one I treasure more than my own life_ , Loki finished that sentence in his mind, _the only one I want here by my side whatever is meant to happen_. “There is only one way for you to put an end to this, Loki. But not how you may conceive. A way that cannot be avoided.”  
 _A way that cannot be avoided._  
Queerly enough, at those final words a sort of pensive determination slowly replaced anxiety and distrust in Loki’s heart.  
 _We will face it together_ , he thought as deeply as he could, beseeching his thought might reach Thor’s soul.   
“You will, Loki. But you will need all your mettle, when the time comes. As will he.”  
 _And together we can just win, just as you said, my sweetest_.  
“Tell me, Heimdall. Tell me what I have to do. What we have to do.”  
“I can’t. As I cannot tell Odin what I see beyond you being that creature. Not now. The future may be changed, if I let any of you know. And the future, as I see it now, _must not_ be changed.”  
Under the stress of keeping himself awake while he was feeling close to fall asleep again, Loki’s head was gripped by a splitting ache. Heimdall’s projection didn’t seem to care about that.  
“What I can tell you is that it must be on Jotunheim. Only on Jotunheim you will be able to face your other self. There, when the time comes, you will know everything. And I hope you will be ready to make the right choice.”  
 _Focused. Stay focused_.  
“Trust, Loki. Trust your own strength and trust _him_.” The voice began fading. “My time here is ending. As is yours, before the sleep catches you again. Now listen carefully. The passageway you opened here is still intact. You will need it.”

_The golden towers of Asgard.  
Nothing, to him, whose body was entirely passed through by the alienating jostle of the light.  
His body.   
Unknowing how, nevertheless he discovered something new about his body.  
He could now double it again and again into a herd of himselves.  
That would turn useful, when he’d be at the core.  
Still far enough from the entrance, he sniffed the air. He snarled. No trace of him. Of the powerful god that smelled familiar and that he could not overthrow. Nor be overthrown by.  
That issue vanished from his body of sensations as if it never existed, as something else arrogantly seized all his perceptive skills at once. Distracting. Interesting. Inviting. That something else was rising all around, growing bigger and bigger, and stronger, and spreading wide, subsuming any other feeling in a huge bubble of fury. Excellent, appetizing fury.  
Coming right from the heart, the very heart of Asgard.  
Something he knew to perfection, something he could ghastly master and be mastered by since ever, and that since ever burned inside him even more lethal than that he felt around.  
Hatred.  
The most dreadful hatred he ever caught from another living creature.  
Awakening in him the most dreadful hatred he himself ever felt._

The twilight had already begun skimming the mountains’ profile with its whispering mantle, shading gently from the deepest red to an improbable violet, when Thor finally saw Loki’s horse tied to a gaunt trunk, alone on the farthest corner of the shore.  
All around, nothing but the silver blanket of the water, glaring with unstable piebald gems in the sunset.   
He had been riding across Asgard all the night before, and all the day, spurring his horse with no rest through the whole continent, forgetting hunger and thirst, until his eyes saw the wavelets of the Sea of Fear from afar.  
He had been there maybe a couple of times before, not more. But he remembered the creepy feeling that snowy desolate landscape could induce into one’s soul. Its name spoke by itself indeed. He fastened the reins to the same tree where he found Loki’s mount, he looked around, disoriented, because he couldn’t see anything but fog, and water, and fluffy snow squeaking under his lurching steps. His heart pulsed in his throat.  
 _Where are you then? Are you still here? Please, little one, where are you?_  
Then, along the shore, almost merged with the snow, Loki’s footprints, leading directly to the lake and stopping just within an inch from the choppy water. Pulled by some unknown higher strength, he moved forwards, and when the footsteps ended he walked one more step on, ready to sink his feet into the water. A blow. A scent. A well known scent.  
And he was there.  
He saw him.  
Before he could see anything around, before he could give form to any thought in his brain, he saw him. He dropped Mjolnir on the floor, Loki turned to his side, at once, catching his presence.  
That was enough.  
They lunged in one another’s arms, snuggling up desperately. Both unable to let go of each other, they breathed the silence together for a while, just listening to their bodies throbbing, as though it had been a thousand years since the last time they hugged.  
“Are you alright?” Thor gasped on his little brother’s neck.  
“I’m fine,” Loki whispered into Thor’s ear, his cheek, his chest, his whole body stuck to his brother’s, his arms grabbing his back. “Now that you’re here.”  
Thor couldn’t stop stroking his hair, praying the heavens to make that instant endless.  
“I thought I’d die when I entered our room… and did not find you.”  
“I told you not to worry…” Loki said sweetly, his lips grazing softly his brother’s stubble. He brushed Thor’s mouth with the tip of his nose, a slow, careful brush, soaking his brother’s breath up as if he was soaking lifeblood. Then he kissed him, lightly, while the ache that was still there after his awakening now faded away from his head, and the percipience of his faculties grew clearer and stronger. No matter his lost powers, no matter his lost sight, and no matter even his crumbling old shelter. Because Thor was the only shelter he needed. “I was so craving for your scent.”  
The eagerness seething all across Thor’s body and soul prevented him from realizing the whimsicality of the place he was inside, since the first step he walked in. Even now he did not notice the slight twist that began drawing pale veins of gold up across the walls around, a while before just grey and wan and oozing deadly dejection. He was so totally aimed to gift his little one with the miracle of a renewed reason to smile that he couldn’t focus on anything else.  
He distanced himself from his brother just the bare minimum to reach with his hand the vial with the potion under his robe and put it in Loki’s palm, making him close his fingers on it to let him know.  
“Here it is, little one,” he said with a smile. “Your sight.”  
Melting on his little brother’s sudden look of relief, his fingertips under his chin, he made him raise his head delicately, struggling inside to restrain the urge to kiss him to the consumption of his lips.  
“They told me how they made it, but I don’t remember now.” Almost religiously, he raised the vial over Loki’s left eye. “Just keep your eyes open.”   
Could Loki see the zeal on Thor’s face in moment, he would have loved him even more, if somewhere in the worlds _more_ was ever possible.  
Thor carefully poured a couple of drops in each Loki’s eye, then closed his lids whit his thumbs and held his head in his hands, peering at every smallest change he could catch in the look on his brother’s face. And he saw a sudden grimace of pain.  
“They said it might hurt,” he whispered, laying a slight kiss on his eyelids. “It won’t last long.” He cuddled him tighter. “Keep them closed until the blue turns into white. They said.”  
Loki complied, lulled in Thor’s embrace, and even if those few beads of safeness were burning darts piercing his brain he realized, little by little, he was not plunged into a deadly darkness anymore; that darkness was now actually a deep blue ocean, from whose bottom he was gradually pulled up through a paler and paler turquoise, until he surfaced a dazzling whiteness in which the pain vanished into an overcoming refreshment.  
When he lifted his head from his brother’s shoulder and timidly opened his eyes, Thor’s awed smile and face were there, shining and heart-warming, ready to swamp him with never-ending bliss. Right away, Thor caught in his brother’s pupils the spark he was so yearning for, and couldn’t hold a deep sigh of reprieve.  
“Can you see me?”  
The brightest smile ever on Loki’s face and the sudden tears in his eyes would have sufficed as an answer.  
“Yes.” Loki took his head in his hands and almost unbelievingly ran his fingers on his forehead. “Yes, I can see you.” On his eyebrows, on his cheeks, on his lips. “My sweetest.” Crying, and smiling, and smiling, and crying. “You’re even more gorgeous than I remembered.”  
He kissed him, Thor kissed him back, they kissed everywhere each other’s face, again and again, a million times. On the growing brilliance that was slowly turning the whole place around them into a crystal castle, time slowed down and almost stopped, as though the heavens above decided that Thor’s prayer was worthy enough and that moment had to last until ever.  
The glaring joy of seeing him again, the sunny touch of his lips, the rekindling sound of his voice erased at once every concern from Loki’s heart, as erased from his mind the shadow of Heimdall and the memory of the heavy words he spoke only a few hours earlier. Clung in Thor’s arms, Loki felt suddenly _invulnerable_. Nothing was anymore, or better still, everything at once became just… _Thor_. It couldn’t last forever, he was aware of that, nevertheless he stated now he had to – _they_ had to – allow all the  room to their _being them_ only.  
“Thor.” He dunked in the entrancing sound of his name. “Thank you.” He drowned in the blue of his eyes. “For all that you do for me.” He breathed the sun of his hair. “For the words you wrote me and I will never forget.” He wept on the snug red of his mouth. “Thank you for being here.” He painted on his tongue with his tongue all the shades of the joy he could feel and almost touch right from his brother’s heart. “For being… you.”  
Still grasped together, they couldn’t stop kissing, and stroking, and rubbing against each other, Thor’s hands feverishly opening Loki’s vest to reach the skin on his chest. Reluctantly enough, on their arousal getting more and more quavering, Loki unstuck his lips from his brother’s and flooded him with the sparkling green of his eyes.  
“Wait.” He whispered softly, his fingertips on Thor’s mouth. “I want to show you something.” He grabbed Thor’s hand, tangling his fingers in his brother’s, he giggled like a child and dragged him along. “Come.”  
Just at that point, following his thrilled brother, Thor finally seemed to realize he was walking across the weirdest place ever. All around them, the walls were _changing_ , pulsating with renewed light, as if they were _alive_. From a listless mouldy dreariness, they were growing silvery and gilded and crystal; under their steps the dusty, sandy floor became mottled marble and everywhere from the invisible ceiling a million glaring strings dropped down over their heads, swinging lightly. Thor couldn’t help but turn his head up and down from side to side, agape, unable to understand, yet going after his brother, who towed him hand in hand.  
“Loki…” he stuttered, smiling with astonishment. “What is this place?”  
“Good question, my handsome,” Loki tittered. “A better one would be… _where_.” He laughed with light heartedness, driving his brother through the corridors, and stairs, and rooms, constantly appearing and disappearing, to the little lost chamber where his old secret passageway laid. “And the best would be… _when_.”  
Oh, laughing. He and Thor laughing, alone and free, laughing as playfully as nothing evil had ever happened, as nothing evil was meant to happen ever after. Up till that moment, Loki wasn’t actually aware of how much he missed that, how much he needed that. Just simple laughing, just forgetting everything, just… being with Thor and… _simply_ love him. A transient taste of what their life could be, in some alternate timeline where no major duty, no devious threat, no deadly pain, no angst, no fight ever existed.   
He stopped right in the middle of the room, keenly looking around to fulfil his restored sight with everything his eyes could reach and ending to sate his seeing starvation on Thor’s puzzled face. He smiled at him again, still grasping his hand, he kissed him on his cheek and whispered to him smoothly, like he entrusted him the most unspeakable of all secrets.  
“Now take a deep breath, close your eyes and just don’t let go of my hand.”  
A step through a foggy veil that became clear only at the last instant, a sudden vortex swallowing them and throwing them forward, somehow similar to the Bifrost’s wave but yet not the same, less violent, more winsome. And way faster.  
Then, a brand new, unthinkable place.  
From their point of view the second they got there, the huge terrain stood out in front of their eyes, shining around with improbable glares, now transparent and then changing colours in stops and starts, suspended in mid air over a pale red lake whose surface was caressed by a gentle breeze. It looked like the peak of a mountain, sliced through by a gigantic, enchanted sword, turned upside down and just put there, not low enough to touch the water and not enough high to vanish into the amber haze of the upper sky.   
Loki felt Thor’s amazement flowing directly from his heart through his hand still clutched in his own and all his soul basked with contentment. They looked into each other’s eyes, no words were needed; Loki just smiled and led his brother forward, holding his hand tight, to the edge of the cliff from where no way to the floating crystal rostrum was visible, until he moved a step in the void. There, a fading stair moulded under his feet and let them reach the plain summit, where a porcelain floor surrounded by a stained glass railing welcomed them in a most astonishing landscape.  
Loki drove his brother closer to the railing and there they just let their gaze get lost on the palpitating enchantment coming true all around them.   
“This… this is incredible…” Thor muttered. “I’ve never… ever seen a place like this in my life before.”  
“Because there isn’t another one.” Loki’s voice brushed Thor’s ear. “This is unique.” He leant his chin on his brother’s shoulder. “We are still in the little room where the passage is, and yet we are somewhere else. Somewhere out of… how can I say it… the custom time and space. This is the most secret place in the universe. And the most… mine. No-one can enter here, no-one can see in here, not even Heimdall. No-one can even _fathom_ here.”  
All around from the changeling sky above, Thor noticed just then, pale blue snowflakes were falling softly in the sunset and alighting on the shore afar, while they vanished in a trice as they touched the surface of the lake. He stretched his palm out to catch some and stare at them dissolving at his warmth. Amazed.  
“It’s… snowing,” he said. “In the sun.”  
“Yes.” Loki wound him with the moss of his gaze. “I like it so much when it snows.”  
“But yet… it’s not cold.”  
Loki held his hand tighter.  
“No, it is not.” And smiled on the heat that moistened their fingers. “Because I am not feeling cold anymore.”  
In the silence that followed, Thor was sure he heard a subtle melody spreading across the air, almost inaudible. _This is the right sound of magic_ , he thought. _The magic that you are to me, the magic that we have become to each other._  
“I used to hide myself here, when I needed to rest my soul,” Loki whispered on his perceptions, putting his arms around Thor’s waist and clinging close to him. “I made this place so that it could shape on my… heart.” He smiled on Thor’s cheek. “Even if I’m powerless now, it still can feel me. It still can make visible how I feel.” Without drifting a single inch away from his brother’s skin, he spread his glance again towards the horizon, whose farthest line was blurring away, purple into the water. “And this is how I feel, all the time, since when I have you beside me.”  
Red, in all its shades. Melted with crystal glare. Orange, blending into yellow, and shy stains of the palest blue, there where the implausible snow had laid. Flaring, and warm. So warm.  
Thor sighed and took his brother’s head in his hands, laying a long kiss on his lips grazed by that red that twinkled all around.   
“Your soul can rest on mine, now, little one.”  
The naturalness that wrapped Thor’s voice saying those so profound words instead made Loki’s eyes fill up with tears and his whole body shiver with lust. He caressed with a pleading look his brother’s face, running his trembling fingers on the border of his armour, right under his neck.  
“Oh, Thor…” he muttered, drawing the profile of his lips with a bunch of tiny milky kisses. “Sometimes I wonder if my soul… is really worthy to rest on yours.”  
Thor simply shut his mouth with a deep, intense kiss. _Don’t say things you know you don’t think_ , his tongue warmly whispered to Loki’s, _and just let me love you and live on your reborn glee._  
The sky fired up together with their bodies, still swathed into the clothes and tarrying on the glaring delight of a recovered peacefulness. Thor felt new energy flowing across his little brother’s limbs, he grabbed his hips, he slipped his hands under Loki’s belt and thawed at the softness of his tummy’s ups and downs while breathing.  
“Thor…” Loki murmured, mildly interrupting their renewed trip to ecstasy. “Please… take your robe off… for me.” His hand slid slowly between Thor’s legs, to gently graze through the clothes his sex arousing. “I am so needing… to just look at you.”  
He pined with tenderness at the sudden look of surprise on Thor’s face, followed by a candid, big smile of compliance. Smoothly, Thor unfastened his cape, a fluffy, red cloud that slipped steamy on the floor as though it fell right from the sky above. A short while after he was wondrously naked in front of Loki’s eyes, that trembled misty with unutterable delight, and craving, and fulfilment. In his unspoilt, righteous magnificence, in his pure strength that didn’t know the fear and in his love that didn’t know demand, all matched flawlessly into that glorious body, Thor was… perfection. Loki leant his hands gently on his brother’s shoulders and grazed their might with velvet fingers, then brushed his arms, and then his pectorals, raptured, in bliss. His cute brown-red nipples, so tiny and almost peeping out from the largeness of Thor’s bosom, those nipples he adored. The sculptured granite of his abdomen, so powerful, so regal, and his majestic sex, standing so proud and wishful under his mellow touch. He skimmed his chest with a devoted kiss, first on the left, then in the middle, then on the right, letting Thor’s hands open his vest, that now became so heavy, and free his skin in turn.  
“Now I know,” he whispered on the enchanted rain of his emotions. “I know I couldn’t live… if I couldn’t see you… ever again.”  
As the last corner of his clothing laid abandoned on the floor, he glued his bare body to Thor’s body, sinking his nails into his brother’s back and his tongue into his mouth, frantically, desperately. Time wasn’t a restriction, there, so time stopped running, or never ran. And even if it did, they had already wiped it out. As space. As the awareness of the oncoming chaos threatening Asgard. As everything else in all the living universes, except the two of them and the renewing, intimate miracle of their melting skins.   
Had Ragnarok itself unleashed at that very moment, they, merely, wouldn’t have noticed at all.   
Leaning against the railing in that unlikely sunset that seemed to last forever, still standing stuck together, they consumed their tongues on every smallest corner of their mouths, and of their lips, and of their faces, and of their necks, sighing in unison on their brushing groins, their fingers running on each other’s back; for the first time since the night after Jotunheim, they felt their confidence completely restored.   
Loki raised his left leg putting his feet on the bulwark, to ease to Thor’s manhood the way it knew so well, and with his airy fingers he grabbed it, to drive it there where he craved it most. Surprised, when his brother’s hand leant on his one and stopped him with determined mildness.  
Thor’s eyes were sapphire melting in his puzzled emerald, his smile a bead of sun dropped to warm up his soul, his voice a stroke cuddling his panting heart.  
“No, little one, wait.” His gaze still fixed in his brother’s, he moved his hand on Loki’s trembling wand. “This time…” He bowed his head slowly, to lean a cloud of kisses on Loki’s breathy chest. “…I want you…” Then sought his eyes again. “…in me.”  
Loki shivered with ravish and let his lips talk in his voice’s place. While extinguishing in his mouth, he unclasped Thor’s sex delicately, as delicately as he slipped his hands on the smooth marble of his brother’s loins, venturing with his fingers along the middle groove, soft as the sound of a cat’s walk; he felt him quiver helplessly when he slid in his index, and then his medium, it always happened when Loki fingered him, Thor couldn’t help himself; it made him almost _vulnerable_ and that, to Loki’s heart, was diving into a bottomless well of endearment.  
“It is so weird… it didn’t happened yet…” Thor held his hands on his brother’s cheeks, his hips following pliant the sweetness of Loki’s fingers rubbing into him deeper. “You… never asked.”  
Loki smiled on his mouth, while kissing him.   
“Looks like…” He ogled him, nipping his lower lip. “…I didn’t need…” And then the upper, lecherously. “…to ask.”  
He bent on his knees daintily, between his brother’s legs, he ran his mouth all across Thor’s groin, breathing his hardened manhood, then dipped his face underneath, right in the middle, his fingers still inside him, his tongue joining them mildly, hankering for the most precious treasure he could think of. He lingered in there at length, moved at his brother’s rim getting more and more confident, _oh, Thor, you taste so wonderful_ , Thor’s hands gripped in his hair, on the muffled sough that from the lake below rippled the silence around to cradle their marvel journey.  
Loki let his tongue and fingers out smoothly just to rise his eyes up to Thor’s face and grab his hands, driving him down astride on his own legs; then he forthwith regained his brother’s most secret corner, not to interrupt the surge of spree colouring both their bodies with the hues of the unthinkable made real.  
Thor’s cape was still there, spread on the changeling floor, and they fell fleecy down on it, eyes locked in each other’s, Thor panting hushly on his brother’s lips, Loki keeping on his magic quest in him, thoroughly, gracefully, enjoying every little grip he felt around his fingers at every smallest movement they induced into him.  
Then Loki’s voice came out, warmer than a furry coat in a winter dawn.  
“Have you… ever?”  
A kiss, while he glided his hand out to widen his brother’s nates, gently, and rub him between with his endearing sex. Thor swallowed his own heart at the sudden shiver the mere touch of Loki’s glans unleashed all over his body.  
“No.” He wheezed. “I never had… male lovers before.”  
And Loki felt he could have climaxed just at the thought of being Thor’s first one.  
 _Then I will make this flawless for you._  
He bent on Thor’s mouth and kissed him, his chest sliding on his brother’s, their tummies panting against one another’s, their bodies warmly grazed by the red of Thor’s cape below. Loki felt his brother’s hands running down his spine to reach and grab his loins, leer and impatient; he got so hardened that it hurt, as he leant his shaft-up on Thor’s rim and felt it trembling, almost shyly at first, unaccustomed, intrigued. That was so… touching. As it was touching, and sizzling, and rewarding, in Thor’s mind, thinking he was about to have his little one inside. About to be totally, unconditionally _his_. Something nearly inconceivable in his whole life, before he indulged his whole life to Loki, still inconceivable if it concerned anyone else but Loki. As that was not an issue, because there would have never been anyone else but Loki, not anymore, not ever. He felt his brother’s glans right on the border, he closed his eyes and smiled, _I so want to feel yours_ , he gasped in his own mind, _I so want you to feel me yours_ , and Loki heard him, “Please, open those eyes,” and mildly crossed his threshold with a first, doting nudge. “…let me look…” Careful, he sighed sweetly on the reflex hold out he met “…into your soul…” and that lasted just an instant. With a warm gasp Thor humoured, lifted his lids, his lips trembling on that unusual frenzy, his hands strongly squeezing Loki’s nates.  
Loki grabbed his shoulders melting his gaze in Thor’s, he pushed again, slowly, they moaned together, hoarsely. Thor was so tight. So wonderfully tight, and hot, and eager. The instinctive grip he clasped Loki’s sex with, as it was in, made Loki shake with overwhelming delight, so he pushed deeper, a smooth, short little shove, then stopped, to relish on his brother’s panting that broke on each single gentle thrust he gave him. He smiled, searching his lips again and just dipping them with his, he smiled, because he knew that if in his former life taking Thor’s most precious trove would have meant final dominance, now it just meant ultimate, mutual devotion. _This… makes me yours… far more than making you mine_. He pushed again, then stopped. Thor tautened in his arms, raised his head gasping, his mouth wide open swallowing air, becoming lost across those pondered pauses that made his fingers poke his brother’s ring and slip inside him, pushing in turn, aching to feel him deeper inside himself.   
“Oh, little one… this is just… you’re just… amazing…”   
Loki quivered madly, _…feel me…_ , closed his mouth with a kiss and pushed again, _…feel me…_ , and faster, _…just keep me inside you, forever._   
“…Thor…” He moaned, a deep, choked moan right on his brother’s, and he was fully in, he halted curtly, arching his back, his hands grasping Thor’s waist, his whole body shaken by the river of swoon that forced them both breathless on that outstanding new firestorm of emotions.  
“…Loki…”, Thor gasped on their sighs, “…just… stay…”, and pressed his brother’s loins harder against his own thighs, sinking his fingers deeper, “…oh, just stay…”, feverishly kissing his chest, greedily nibbling at his nipples, desperately coiling himself all around his shaft. “…there…”  
Loki froze on that plea, _as long as you wish, my sweetest ruler_ , gasping on the uncontrollable vortex of pleasure that being there, _as long… as you wish_ , stuck into his brother, piercing him in the deepest and feeling all his inner side pulsating, clasping around his own vibrating sex, released across both their bodies and cut both their breath off.  
Hung to that unending moment of flawless rapture, Thor intertwined his legs to Loki’s, they mingled sighs, and moans, and whispers, and sweat and shivers, and Loki tried to stay still and feel him shuddering with delight as long as possible, fighting himself to hold his climax back.  
In a prolonged, wide move then Loki pulled his sex out almost entirely, then in again, then out, and in, slower each time, each time reaching him deeper, each time stopping a longer instant there, making Thor quiver rashly, and groan gritting his teeth, and drill down with his fingers inside his little one, and push him in even harder in return. The whole place around sort of pulsated hugely in tune with them, and in that place so impossibly unique they melted so crazily to one another they felt like they were actually grown one single wondrous maze of flesh and feelings, made just to blow up and be consumed by love. In that place, taking shape solely on the piebald shades of their upmost belonging to each other, they had no further doubt that was the only reality meant to exist, where everything, being just the two of them, was simply _right_ , the only conceivable rightness in whole time and space.  
There, trembling even in the depths of his tiniest bone on his brother pushing into his soul itself, an instant before he could do nothing else but yield to the most stunning climax he had ever experienced, there Thor realized that was, to his and Loki’s bond, the final ingredient, the very last tile to perfection. And then he spilled, and on his protracted spilling he moaned a lengthened _ooh_ , so soft, so warm, so _helpless_ that Loki as well couldn’t hold any longer, and gliding on the moist heath of his brother’s semen he lavished all himself inside him, wildly and torridly, latching on to his suave guardian in an everlasting shiver.  
Eyes closed, clasped together, confused together, trembling.  
Panting.  
Breathing.  
Wafting.  
A tuneful silence all around embracing them.  
His face sunk in Thor’s hair, his lips on his neck, his arms wedged under his back, his legs and his brother’s weaved together, Loki rested inside him without moving a muscle until his sex softened and slipped out by itself, cuddly. He gloated when Thor, at that sudden sensation of emptiness, grasped him tighter in his arms.  
“You…” Thor kissed his brow. “…are not going anywhere… from me…” Secured his leg behind Loki’s hips. “…farther than this, never.” Clutched his head with his hand. “Ever.” Locked him in the most sealing grip he was able to without causing him pain. “Keep that well stuck in your mind.”  
Thor sounded so serious saying those words that Loki was almost afraid he could kill him if he dared to make a single move. He grazed his brother’s neck with his tongue, sticking his lips to his skin as though he wanted to suck his blood out.  
“I’m not asking…” He nestled into him the closest he could. “…for anything else.”  

When Thor woke up in the cosy freshness of the dawn – or of the sunset still, he could not tell - he found Loki already awaken, wrapped in his cape and in his arms, staring at him, smiling. Closer to each other than a glove to its hand, Loki breathed on Thor’s mouth and the enchanted forest of his eyes covered him with a cloud of spring leaves. Thor smiled on his smile, ran the back of his fingers on his cheek, smoothly, bewitched and touched and incredulous as though he was looking at the unconceivable beauty of that face for the first time.  
“That’s what I want to be the first thing I see when I open my eyes in the morning, every day of my life.” He slightly bussed his smile with revering lips. “Until the last one.”  
Loki ran his tapered fingers through his brother’s hair, again and again, unable to satiate his reborn sight with the reviving splendour of Thor’s smile.  
“You will.” He kissed him, reluctant to move a single cell of his skin off from his brother’s. “Just promise me I will have the same.”  
 _Let’s stay here until ever_ , they thought as one. _Just stay here, hugging, looking at each other and nothing more._  
“Heimdall was here to talk to me.”   
Reality broke in as a rude intruder together with Loki’s whispered words.   
Thor caught a slight shadow of concern in his brother’s eyes.   
“Was he?”   
“Yes. Before you came.”  
“What did he tell you?”  
“He said… it has to be on Jotunheim.” He sighed deeply, casting that thought away, and smiled weightless, his hand on his nape, his thumb on his temple. “I’ll tell you everything… later.”  
Thor couldn’t hide a sudden worried look, so Loki bent on his face, his hair caressing Thor’s cheekbones, and kissed him sweetly.  
“Here is nowhere and everywhere,” he whispered warmly, his voice calm and reassuring. “Here is never and always.” Locked in his eyes, he leant his head the nearest he could to his brother’s. “Nothing can touch us, while we are here.” His nose brushing Thor’s stubble. “Let’s keep the whole rest outside.” Another kiss, on the appeased light he saw rising back in Thor’s eyes. “Just… for a while longer.”  
Under Thor’s cape, their bodies were still blended together, their legs entwined, their bellies throbbing in a renewing wave of desire. All of a sudden, Thor disappeared beneath his cloak slipping along his little brother’s body, to lean his lips on his lukewarm tummy and spread a swish of pecks all over it, making him chortle and shiver with childish enjoyment. Caught in that little game, he then started nipping Loki everywhere, on his belly, on his groin, between his thighs, more and more harassing as Loki’s laughs got more and more uncontrollable, until “Stop it!”, Loki yelled grasping his hair, and he stopped, yes, he stopped being just funny and took him in his mouth, forcing his laugh to turn into a downy moan, while he felt him getting hard right on his tongue. Both deeply languishing into their soul for their ceaseless lusting after each other.   
“I will never… get tired of this…” Loki sighed, following through with his hands on Thor’s head the loose moves of his mouth on his groin. “…never.”  
Thor lingered on him for a while, then let him out, gently, as gently he slid back out of the mantle and reached his lips, burning and tender, “…and neither… will I…”, unable to restrain his fingers from rubbing Loki’s shoulders, and arms, and flank, and legs. He put his hand under Loki’s satin thigh and slowly pulled his little brother’s knee up to his chest, brushing him endearingly with his whispering manhood, right on his rim, that quivered.  
“So… do we still have some time…” he murmured “…before we must go?”  
Loki tensed up in his hands, softly, at the delicate pokes of his brother’s gemstone.  
“Here…” he said smoothly, welcoming Thor inside with a long, sweet little moan, and closed his eyes at the unspeakable rapture that overflowed his body every single time his faithful god slid into him. “…we have all the time in the universes.”

One or one thousand days after - they were the only ones to know -, they overstepped the boundary through a swath nobody else could pass. And they walked tall, side by side, across the frosty rain of Jotunheim, carrying their strength in their limbs and their love in their hearts.


	7. Unforeseen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fever for the incoming fight ran all across their limbs, more burning, more exciting than ever. They ideally smiled at each other as they felt almost aroused, because for the first time in their lives they were about to start a fight _more together_ than ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter may sound a bit cryptic. It is supposed to be. Everything will be clarified when the time comes.

_“Tell me about magic, little one.”  
“Magic is an alluring, tasty gift. And a ravaging curse.”  
…  
“Tell me about endlessness.”  
“Endlessness is just a dull sparkle of light, or darkness, when you can hold it on the palm of your hand.”  
…  
“And tell me about the most incredible story you ever read.”  
“That story is still being written. It’s the one I’m living now, here, with you.”_

The wind.  
The biting wind ruffling their hair and creasing their capes.  
And a thousand frozen drops lashing their faces.  
Nothing else in the leaden greyness of Jotunheim, steady and stifling in its unchangeable landscape that knew no seasons. The echoes of the ancient greatness of that Realm shouted roughly, through the huge ruins of its once huge mansions and palaces, inside Loki’s soul, awakening in him the twisted jumble of hatred and loathing and misbegotten sense of belonging that - despite his unwilling - that place always forced him to feel.  
He pulled those hideous sensations away and focused on Thor’s reassuring presence at his side; he shivered with ultimate trust feeling him gushing with the urge of fighting, that glared in the blue of his eyes searching around with burning heed.  
Nevertheless, no trace of the creature.  
 _Where is it?_ , Loki thought. _Heimdall, did you lie to me?_  
Nothing.  
They moved forward, abreast, silently, smelling the iced air around to catch any smallest sign of change.  
Then, all of a sudden, they felt them.  
Still invisible, but close. Very close.  
Thor stopped, grabbing Loki’s arm and making him stop as well, both heavily panting clouds of foggy breath, as the huge figures revealed themselves through the thickness of that frozen vibe.  
A dozen, at least, surrounding the two of them. Towering over their heads and growling subtly. Standing still. Waiting.  
In a fast move, unseen, Thor clasped Loki’s hand and squeezed it, his strength flowed through his grip all across his brother’s arm, and chest, and body.  
“Remember you’re still powerless, Loki,” he said with resolute voice, no need to turn around and watch his brother into his eyes. “You can still be badly injured. Or even killed.” He pressed his back to Loki’s, taking a deep breath together with him while rising Mjolnir. “Stay by my side.”  
“I can still make the best of my spear,” Loki answered proudly, clutching his lance tighter with both his hands and keeping his body stuck to his brother’s. “And of my daggers.”

_“He said now time is reshuffling all around. Because of my re-opening the rift in my secret shelter.”  
“And does time matter, little one?”  
“As long as we can restore its balance in the end, no, it does not.”  
“And as long as we can make all the time ours.”_

Everything was like stuck in time, until one of the Jotuns moved a step ahead, piercing Thor’s face with the cold fire of his eyes.  
“What do you think you are doing, Asgardian?” His hoarse voice filled the void around with palpable revulsion. “You really believe it will be that easy to end this?” He grinned on Thor’s grimace of scorn. “Your mighty hammer is not enough to vanquish a spell this powerful.”  
He slowly turned his head the bare minimum he needed to hint at Loki, accurately avoiding to lay his eyes on him.  
“Ask him. He should know.”  
All hanging on the edge of the blow, Thor still forced his voice locked in his throat, feeling his brother shiver with anger and press himself closer to his flank.  
“And tell me, Asgardian.” The giant stepped forward again. “What is your purpose… in bringing here this worthless, lousy bitch of yours?” His enormous face was now shadowing them both. “Are you seeking for revenge?”  
He chuckled, jeering, and greedily licking his own lips as though he could savour their fury right on his tongue.  
“…or does he just want to taste _more_ from us?”  
“Enough!”  
Thor gritted his teeth in rage, Loki panted. Mjolnir aimed above, Thor roared to the sky calling the thunder, that cracked down in more and more rumbling lightings, together with Loki’s wild scream while charging his spear against the giants he had opposite him. The fever for the incoming fight ran all across their limbs, more burning, more exciting than ever. They ideally smiled at each other as they felt almost aroused, because for the first time in their lives they were about to start a fight _more together_ than ever.

_“Tell me about time, then, little one.”  
“Time is re-writing itself right on our moves. I cannot tell if now is still actually now. Maybe it’s before, maybe it’s after.”  
…  
“Tell me about this… Elsewhere.”  
“I can’t remember it. All I can see are frames… like seaweed woods, and eerie scents, and haze.”  
…  
“Tell me about your feelings when you’re there.”  
“I can’t feel warmth nor cold, I feel like dawn does not rise and sunset does not fall, I’m sure no living beings that you can see walk there, just shadows.”_

**Once again, that baffling feeling of being thrown across his own subconscious as if its control was not at his discretion anymore.  
Once again, the palpable awareness of the power that unrelenting spell still had on him.  
But now, after the time that wasn’t actual time spent in his secret place, after ensuring the upmost seal to the upmost bond the universes could ever see, now he felt _confident_.  
So weird, and yet so warming and reassuring, his feeling confident.  
Never in his life before he yielded to confidence.  
Never in his life before he felt that confident.**

_“I’d never thought it would have been so easy.”  
“What, little one?”  
“Becoming something I didn’t fathom I could ever become.”  
“They say that opposites match, don’t they?”  
“That’s a bit prosaic if referred to us, my sweetest, but yes, so they say.”  
“And when they match, they must also blend to one another.”  
“I guess so.”  
“Then, no wonder if it has been so easy.”_

**As he felt _conscious_.  
Conscious about his, their motivation to turn the millennial balance between realities upside down.  
 _“There is only one way for you to put an end to this, Loki. But not how you may conceive. A way that cannot be avoided.”_  
And a sudden stab tearing his soul asunder.  
Conscious.  
Conscious about the price that was meant to be paid to that achievement.**

In the plumbean darkness of the most guarded room on Asgard, unheeded, the Casket flickered, troublesome.  
For the first time since centuries.  
Energy.  
Turbulent, uncontrollable energy.  
From the proximity of an unnameable being that contained the whole wild strength of the archetypal chaos wherein they both sprung when time itself began.   
Blowing, shouting energy.  
Like a call coming directly from the core of the primeval elements that gave the worlds their very earliest shape.

**“You. Are starting to see. What this all means. Aren’t you, Loki?”  
He was.  
But that was Elsewhere.  
He couldn’t remember when he fell asleep.  
He couldn’t remember when he and Thor stroke the first blow, nor how many giants they killed.  
He had just the gut feeling that everything now was somehow different.  
Even his Elsewhere now looked somehow different.  
“You moved. Things. That were not meant. To be moved. Loki.”**

_Something weird.  
He smelled something weird in the changeling air around.  
He couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but it was… weird.  
Although he sent a dozen of himselves all across the golden city of Asgard, fighting and killing Aesirs around, sucking inside his only true self tenfold energy from all those delicious deaths, he could not cross the last border and reach the palace.   
There _the light _was, screaming silently at him.  
But still he could not reach it.  
Why, he couldn’t get. That utter hatred that burnt directly from the heart of the mansion was an invisible wall, impenetrable, unbreakable. And something else was intruding on his path, something else was pulling in, he couldn’t figure out from where, from when, how far, how fast; looked like it came from everywhere and every-when, or nowhere and no-when. Baffling him and inducing his rage to grow more and more ruthless.  
Then, rising his sight up over the golden pinnacles, he saw _the tree _.  
A sinister sough gurgled in his throat.  
That tree was huge. The hugest of its kind. The hugest he had ever came across. So huge that the living force it spread hit him like a blast of pure might, as he diverted his attention to it.  
And there he wended._

**He shivered.  
With smugness, and foreboding, and expectation.  
 _If I moved things that were not meant to be moved, perhaps I can move even…_  
A chuckle.  
“You better do not rely. On the little strength. You managed to get back.”  
He panted, on the vortex of thoughts that swirled in his mind, so fast he could not even try to put them together and give them sense.  
“It will be not worthwhile. Loki.” A grin. Sneaky, and coarse. “Maybe the contrary.”  
He felt rage burning all across his body, he pulled his mind forward trying to reach a sign beyond his Elsewhere, a whisper, a rustle. A fragment of Thor to fill the void caused by his absence in that still inconceivable place.  
“ _There_. In the Realm you used to call yours. They are already writing. Your fate.”  
 _I need myself awaken. I have the power. To force myself awaken_.  
“You have indeed. Loki. But. Because you moved those things. Soon your other self will not need you to sleep. Anymore. To walk _there_.”  
 _I have to remember all this. I have to_.  
“You won’t. Loki.”**

_“Yggdrasil.”  
“What about Yggdrasil, little one?”  
“Dying. Yggdrasil is dying.”_

Stone, his eyelids slowly blinking in the dim.  
Fog in his mind.  
“…Thor?”  
A pungent smell of mould filling his nostrils as he took a deeper breath and tried to figure out where he was. Dampness, and cold.  
“…Thor…”  
Alone.  
Blood dropping from his mouth, his wrists aching, his arms tensed. Fettered. Restrained.  
Again.  
He screamed from despair, he cried, trying to pull himself free, uselessly. _It can’t be_ , he shouted inside, _it can’t_. Was that some forgotten cell on Jotunheim? Why couldn’t he remember a thing about the fight? Did they manage to stop them, in the end? How? Why was he still alive, then? And most of all, why Thor wasn’t there? Did they…  
“ _He_ managed to stop you, in the end.”   
The voice silenced all his thoughts at once.  
He panted, forcing his eyes to see through the tears and the echo resounding in his head. His breath got faster and his stomach twitched as he started to perceive the familiar shades in the colour of the walls that surrounded him, to discern the well known shape of the arches over his head, and to catch the subtle tingle in the invisible magic barrier that locked the threshold. Something he knew so well.  
And he realized.  
“…is this…Asgard?”

_“Whatever is meant to happen from now on, let’s just forget to think about it until tomorrow. And make this night unending.”  
“…meant to happen, little one? What is that you foresee and I cannot?”  
“Shush. I’ve got a gift for you.”_

“It is, Loki. The All-Father brought you both back before you could start the fight. And just in that right instant you fell asleep again.” The voice paused on his enraged startle, on his pointless attempts to free his arms. Then echoed again. “It was meant to happen. This is not really crucial, and yet it is, since now time is reshuffling all around.”   
“…Heimdall?”  
No-one was there in flesh. Just the voice.  
Loki tried to focus, to remember something, to dig into the dark of his own memory and catch back at least some fragments. Fog was all he was able to find.   
“Why am I here, Heimdall?” he gasped, on the pain growing together with the notion of reality. The chains blocking his wrists clinked as he wiggled, bawling desperately. “Where… where is Thor? Did he lock him up too? Did he?!”  
“No.”  
A short moment of silence, in which Loki’s wheezing resounded with thorn in the heavy emptiness of the cell.  
“Odin thinks he can change your brother’s mind,” Heimdall’s voice went on. “He cannot see. And without seeing, he has already arranged… things.”  
Fortified by the glaring awareness that nothing in the Nine Realms and further, and even less Odin’s dull endeavours, would ever had the power to make Thor change his heart, Loki smiled in the half-light. But still, he cursed his own self for being what he was, because being what he was had driven him locked in that cell, powerless, preventing him from standing at Thor’s side now that he would need him most.  
“In spite of what the healers and the sorcerers keep telling him, the All-Father is still certain you are in complete mastery of your powers, Loki.”   
“But I am not!” Loki yelled, passed through by a helpless flow of anger. “If I just were…”  
Heimdall’s voice abruptly interrupted his outburst.  
“He looks incapable to pull his sight beyond his misjudgement, and his misjudgement will lead to the Nine Realms’ downfall, even though he is sure he’s acting for the best of his people.” A veil of awe palliation mantled the words that followed. “Perhaps, even for a god that mighty, by now he has just grown too… old.”  
Loki frowned, _Odin’s moods are not of my concern_ , at times distracted by his hurting arms, _we were fighting for the safeness of his Realm and nevertheless his blind hatred locked me here_ , at times by his yen for waking up still clung in Thor’s embrace, _Odin, to me, means less than nothing now_ , finding out everything was just the scariest of the nightmares, and just his love, their love was real.  
“This is why things are meant to change, Loki,” Heimdall talked on, as if he didn’t catch his thoughts at all, and as though he did instead, at the same time. “The bond between you and Thor, the spell the Jotuns casted on you, the mayhem threatening Asgard because of that spell… and the current chaos in time because of your re-opening your secret passageway… Each thing draws itself into a far bigger picture that is re-drawing itself as well, again and again, until you’ll make your final choice. Because your choice and your choice only will define how the universes will look after this  havoc.”

_“Little one… have you ever thought… when this is all over… we could bugger off everything and be just… us, just… Thor and Loki?”  
“You mean like… to Hel with godhood, just Thor and Loki, lovers, bound together beyond the end of time itself?”  
…  
“Living in some lost place, where no-one knows who we really are.”  
“No more fights, no more troubles, no more killing?”  
…  
“And no more Odin, no Jotunheim, no duties to fulfil on someone else’s behalf.”  
“I dream of that since the first night we loved, my sweetest.”_

“My… final choice… will define the future of us all?…” Loki shook his head, disheartened. “What choice? And… how? You’re talking riddles, All-Seer.”  
“It won’t take you long now to understand.”  
 _You sound so sure of that, Gate-Keeper_ , Loki thought, unable to find a sparkle of clarity in the whirlwind of visions, and feelings, and misgivings eddying all across his soul and body. _And I just want all this to stop once and for all_. He felt his upper lip pulsating, he rubbed his tongue on the still bleeding cut and swallowed his own blood, while all his bones, not just his arms and wrists, were starting to ache again, from a pain that was not merely physical and that he was not going to be able to suffer any longer. He lapsed his head down on his own chest, _please, Thor, come and take me_ , new unmeant tears filling his eyes on the sudden soreness that spread over his anger, _here is the farthest place from home I can conceive_ , awakening the endless consciousness of his still dreadful weakness, _please, just come and take me the outermost you can_.  
“When… when will this end, Heimdall?” The abrupt feebleness of his own voice murmuring those almost frightened words just drove him dazed. “I am not sure… how long I can endure…”  
“ _When_ is no longer meaningful, Loki. Perhaps it already ended. Perhaps it never will.” Damp, swollen mist slowly wafting around. “I will talk to you again, when time will let me, so be there. It will be the last time.”

_“Shush. I’ve got a gift for you.”  
…  
“Do you like what you see?”  
“Oh, little one… are you… even real?”  
…  
“You… you are made of skies and seas.”  
“I am made of the colour of your eyes.”_

“How could you do that?!” Thor roared in the grip of fury, hitting with Mjolnir one of the braziers near the throne and making it fall apart in pieces.  
The clatter echoed in the vastness of the room, so huge, so empty now that everybody else had left the two of them alone.  
Odin blocked his son’s arm in a powerful, rabid grasp before Thor could deal a second blow.  
“Did you lose your mind?!” His one eye glared with unrestrained rage. “I won’t allow you to start a war on your misplaced feelings! And I won’t let him intoxicate your mind with his scams!”   
For an endless instant, with gritted teeth, panting, and snarling, they both stayed hanging to their caustic gazes, that clashed against one another as though they were about to fulminate each other.  
“As the one who called himself his father, who claimed to love him, you should be happy that he’s at last recovering from the hell he went through…” Thor’s veins pulsed all along his neck. “And most of all, you should trust me, and my feelings, when I tell you he is changed!” He didn’t let his sight down even for a single second, staring back at his father with the unassailable strength that the lightness of his deployed heart instilled into him. “What do you do, instead? You lock him up, like the last of the renegades!”  
 _Where is the good old father I used to love when I was a child? What happened to the mighty and cheerful god who held us both in his arms, teaching us about life, and honour, and loyalty?_  
“I demand that you release him at once!”  
“He is nothing else but the last of the renegades! He is spreading doom across the Realms through that devilish creature no-one can kill! Trying to seize the Casket and bring it back to the Jotuns! How can you be so blinded?” Odin’s mouth shouted right on Thor’s face. “And too long I abided this twisted affair of yours already, now that’s enough! Your mind is so clouded from your frenzy for flesh, from the lechery he is inducing into you with his tricks that you lost your capability to see the mere truth!”  
Thor froze looking at his father’s face, unable to catch even the smallest sign of tolerance. Millennia of arrogance petrified into those wrinkles, on those white hair, in that single, blue eye - survived to witness the ruin of his own ancestry, he almost could hear Odin say.  
“Never, ever in my life my mind has been more lucid, father.” His voice sounded so forceful that, even though for a short moment, he compelled the All-Father silent. “And the… _mere truth_ is… I once considered you wise, maybe the wisest among all the Aesirs that ever walked on Asgard.” He fixed his gaze into his father’s, making himself sure not to leave any doubt on his resolution. “Day by day, now, I’m realizing more and more clearly…” And ultimate disillusion. “…how wrong I was.”  
His lips clamped, his lids tightened, Thor panted keeping his eyes stuck on the look of revulsion, and fury, and frenzy burning on Odin’s face. He got closer to him to grab his neck and press his fingers around it, to feel his jugular pulsating.  
“Take me to him.” He could smell Odin’s aversion as he spoke right on his mouth. “Now.”  
On the strong grip the All-Father fastened around his son’s wrist forcing his hand off, the whole palace suddenly rumbled in a dreadful earthquake that lasted some seconds and made them both stumble.   
They froze aghast for an instant.  
“Can’t you see, you fool?” Odin blew then, shaking Thor off from himself. “Asgard is right on the edge of ruin!”  
“Not by his fault! Nor mine!” Thor had to use violence on his own self to avoid raising Mjolnir against him. “We were about to stop all this, you are the one who prevented us!”  
“It’s not the Jotuns who need to be stopped! It’s him!”  
“I tell you he is changed, father!”  
“He cannot!” Odin’s face was a mask of rage, while his voice resounded through the nebulous screaming starting to come from outside. “Change!” He grabbed Thor’s arms, he shook him frantically. “Are you really that credulous?!”  
Thor grabbed his father back in turn, shoved him towards the doors of the throne room, that opened, and from there across the wide corridor, where some guards, astonished, suddenly rose their lances waiting for an order. Not Odin, nor Thor considered them worthy of a glance.  
“Ask Heimdall if you can’t trust me, father, ask the one who can see and foresee everything!”  
“I don’t need to ask anyone! I perfectly know what I brought into my house, into my Realm! And even if at first I thought it was a hope that I was bringing, now more than ever I see that I just sentenced our worlds to perdition!”  
Thrust after thrust they climbed down through the dimmer and dimmer hallways, and stairs, and rooms, followed nearby by a growing number of still hesitating guards, until they reached the dungeons.   
As Thor was in and saw Loki, tied up in that cell, blood on his mouth, flinching and gasping with relief at his sight, he forgot Odin, and their crucial fight, and the guards standing ready to hit him. Loki leapt up, faltering, dangled to the chains that hung from the ceiling, and instinctively stretched out towards him, both craving for each other’s clinch. With a roar that made all the guards around take a step back and Odin himself quiver, Thor rushed to the threshold, banged it with Mjolnir and was roughly thrown back on the floor by the invisible barrier, that cracked in a violent lightning charge.  
As he stood on his own feet again, woozy, his fury went wild, he just swung his hammer around, blindly, he smashed the closest of the guards dead at once, then crumbled the next one’s head, then chopped down the third.  
At that point, shouting so loud that even the cracks in the bricks frightened, Odin jumped on him and seized him brutally against the wall.  
“Enough!” he growled on Thor’s face, rabidly. “I should have chained you also, you recreant, you are not even worthy to be called an Asgardian anymore!”  
Thor’s eyes kept constantly leaping from his father’s face to his brother’s, to desperately reassure him, to claim support to his own bafflement and to feel stronger and righteous in finding it.  
“Then do it!”, he yelled, pulling the All-Father off and rising Mjolnir right in front of his eyes. “Or are you just too coward to lock me up together with him? Because if in your twisted mind he is that guilty, then you are right, I am guilty as well!”  
On a second, stronger tremor that made all the furnishing around fell from their places, on the echo of chaos seething outside, Odin furiously bashed the floor with his spear Gungnir and the main portal of the dungeons opened, letting two more guards in. Thor snarled, _you wouldn’t dare to do that_ , ready to strike his father, then winced, as he realized the two were carrying a changeling, long, sparkling dagger in their hands. One of a workmanship he had never seen before.  
Before Thor’s appalled eyes, and before Loki’s, still gasping silently from his guardhouse, the guards kneeled in front of the All-Father and handed the dagger out to him, devotedly, like they were dealing with the most sacred relic in the Realm.  
“It is done, my king.”  
As if some alternate timeline just popped in, everything suddenly stopped, on Odin’s grin of fulfilment, on Thor’s dazzled panting, on Loki’s grievous sighs of oppression.  
“About time,” Odin said with a chuckle, slowly closed his hand around the hilt and rose the shimmering weapon, thoroughly inspecting the blade with a morbid rush of delight.  
Thor frowned, puzzled, he could feel Loki’s anguish growing right inside his own bones, he got closer to the cell holding his hand out to him, without looking away from his father.  
“…what…?”  
Odin’s gnarled smile oozed lunacy, Thor was now sure of that. And his blood ran cold as never ever before in his whole life.  
“This dagger has been forged in the caves of Nidavellir,” the All-Father stated, proudly, caressing the blade with his eye as though it were his own last offspring, the most awaited, the most beloved. “For months, for years, I secretly strove in order to ensure Asgard with some unerring precautions, able to nullify the threat that he embodies.” He didn’t seem to notice the stunned look on Thor’s face. “Permanently, definitely, if needed. Because I knew the time would come, eventually.” Nor the wave of dismay in Loki’s eyes. “And finally, here it is. Forged from his unheard whispers in his most lonely nights, from the tears he shed unseen after his nightmares, from his most dreadful pain, and madness, and slyness. Three frozen drops from his Jotun soul to make it lethal, and the last scream from his severed memories to make it indestructible.”   
Thor chilled, listening to his father like he was spectating some perverted comedy, _months, years? You spent months, years planning his death? That far has gone your hatred?_ , bewildered, unable to let even a single word out. _How could I not see that?_  
And there, almost petrified and just keeping looking for his brother’s eyes in that absurd situation, there Loki too started to _see_.  
 _“There is only one way for you to put an end to this, Loki. But not how you may conceive.”_  
When Odin finally deigned to lay his gaze back on his son, Thor’s bemusement swamped him in a blaze.  
“Tell me… tell me you’re jesting, father.”  
“Do I look like I am in the mood for jesting?” He glanced at Loki, and in his glance there was no sign of the forgotten love, the fatherly love that for most of his childhood made Loki fancy he was part of a family. Slowly, in the unreal silence that overflew the place, holding the magic dagger as if it burnt in his hand, Odin drew nigh the cell. “No-one else but him can be killed by this dagger.”  
 _You are not my father_. Thor clasped his fingers convulsively around Mjolnir’s handle and stepped between his father and the cell. _Some spell must have hit you as well_. There he stood, fierce, to make Odin well aware that, to get to Loki, he had to kill him first. _You can’t be my father_.  
The thickness of the tension which father and son oppressed each other with could have been cut with a sword stroke. They remained silent, grumbling, still, piercing one another with their scorching looks.   
“Father!” Thor blew again at the end. “Stop this madness! I know you are not really willing to do that!” He grasped his father’s wrist. “Give me that dagger!”  
Odin gritted his teeth, wriggling his hand away from the grip, in fact tightening his fingers on the weapon, that sizzled, almost alive, with pulses and sparkles.  
“You _know_?” He moved a step ahead, menacing, throwing up all his contempt on his son’s face. “All that you know is your deviousness, that led you to place your libido before everything else, including your honour, your loyalty, and your duties towards your House and your people!”  
 _Lost. He is lost_ , Thor thought, clearly smelling insanity in his father’s words, and yet – deep down in his heart – unable to admit that all the way.  
“How is that you can’t figure it out, father?!” He had to rise his forearm and stuck it on Odin’s chest, to contain his new rush. “How is that you can’t see that Loki and I are just trying to make our best to set things right?!”  
Odin shook his head angrily with a peevish shout, heavily pressing his son in turn.  
“Stop talking… stop _thinking_ of him as a hero! He is a goddamn plotter! Who plotted on you so cunningly that you became his slut!”  
Almost out of control at that last word, Thor spitted out all the rage torching inside him in one, single mad scream that made all the guards jump and burned his throat sore.    
“You called him your son! And my brother!”  
And there, a grin, on Odin’s mouth. Sarcastic, dirking. A few loose, calibrated words, spoken with thorough cruelty, in order to sting his son straight in the heart.  
“But now we both agree on that, that he is not… your brother. Don’t we?”  
Panting, all his veins throbbing, even his head pulsating, Thor wiggled out of his father’s grasp and forced his own grinding quiet. _Alright_ , he thought. _There’s nothing left in you that I can save for good_.  He searched for Loki’s eyes, eager, and drowned roundly into them, making himself sure his little brother could stay linked to his gaze while he was speaking.  
“No, he is not.” His voice sounded so deeply heartfelt. “He is so much more.” So warmly assertive, and reliable. “He is something you can’t even begin to understand, you pathetic, foolish, madcap old man.”  
Incapable to admit - to himself mostly - he could do nothing against such a supreme commitment, Odin yielded to dudgeon and rose Gungnir slowly against his son.  
“How shameless have you become to talk to me in that manner?” He seethed with rage, as he saw Thor not even giving a hint of a step back. “I am still your father! And your king! You better know your place!”  
The haughty smile that showed on Thor’s face at that point burnt in his father’s soul more devastating than a hundred blazes.  
“I perfectly know my place,” he answered, made peaceful by the undefiled confidence in his heart. Again, he sought his brother’s look, again he stuck his own in it. “It’s by his side.” And shivered, seeing tears welling up in Loki’s eyes at his last sentences. “Now, give me that dagger.” On his request, he noticed, the blade vibrated again in a light pulse, as if it was breathing on its own. “And open that damn cell. I won’t ask you anew.”  
As he stretched his palm out to claim the dagger, the weapon ripped itself out from Odin’s clasp and nuzzled tame into Thor’s hand, as if it belonged to him from time immemorial. They all stayed astonished for an unending instant, Odin was speechless, frowned, the guards wide-eyed, Thor peering at Loki, who simply shook his head in a dazzled little move. Thor stared at the dagger, now palpitating stable in his fist, then rose a prideful gaze right on his father. _This is the proof that you’re not meant to harm him_ , he thought so loudly that even the walls heard him, and secured the weapon to his belt.  
 _“But not how you may conceive.”_  
Burdened under Thor’s implacable eyes, and by an evidence that not even he could deny, at last Odin hit the ground with Gungnir, snarling inside with ultimate mortification, and the magic barrier broke down.  
Thor rushed inside like a storm, Loki tensed towards him, one hit of Mjolnir and the chains snapped letting him free. His legs collapsed at once, Thor grabbed him quickly and nestled him against his chest, they both fell on their knees, feverishly clinging to one another, while every other thing around freezed in the saving grace of that craved grip. Right before Odin’s eyes they sighed, squeezing each other in a convulsive hug, that lasted ages; then, mild as a breath, Thor held his brother’s wrists, so pale, so smooth, so fragile, on his own palms, grazing and kissing them delicately where the chains had left their spiteful signs; right before Odin’s eyes he took Loki’s head in his hands, gently, and stroked his hair, and brow, and cheeks, and neck, lost into his gloomy pleading eyes, he panted “You alright, little one?” right on his mouth, and breathed tenderly on his wounded lips, which he skimmed with his own a thousand times.   
“If they did hurt you… you tell me, and I will break each single bone in their bodies, before I kill them.”   
He was not seeing Odin anymore, he was not even feeling his presence anymore, because now he could hold Loki in his arms again, and again that was enough to him. As was enough to Loki.   
“It does not matter,” Loki whispered, his fingers running through his brother’s hair. “Let’s just… just take me… away from here. And from his hatred.”  
And on his little wet smile of relief, just palely veiled by a shadow of discouragement, Thor kissed him deeply, slowly, at length, candidly unconcerned of the astounded guards, and even less of a dumbstruck Odin, whose blind and dried up hubris nothing could do but laying powerless and niggling in front of the untouchable omnipotence spreading from the pureness of that kiss.  
But then, again, the floor rumbled fearfully under their knees. Again the whole mansion quaked, making Odin and the guards falter and rise their eyes above, as if they were looking for an answer.  
Loki reluctantly detached his lips from Thor’s, still locked to his breath, still plunged in his eyes. His voice came out softer than a hummingbird’s flight, and yet soaked with apprehension.  
“Yggdrasil.”  
Thor knitted his brow, floored, breathing his brother’s anxiety.  
“What about Yggdrasil, little one?”  
A flickering, in the green of Loki’s eyes.  
“Dying. Yggdrasil is dying.” He didn’t need to add more to Thor’s sudden look of incredulity. “We must hurry.”  
Thor helped him standing, put his arm around his waist and sustaining him with plain, loving care stepped out from the cell clinging him to his side. He stopped just an instant before his father, to lay a gaze of contempt on his averse face.   
“And still you don’t get it, do you?” He sentenced, unhopeful. “I feel so sorry for you.”   
Growling silently inside, Odin didn’t glance down.  
“Shut up, and just get out of my sight. You are miserably unworthy of the godhood your breed gifted you with.”  
“Then banish us both, if you think we deserve it.” His left hand tighter on Loki’s hip, his right one stronger on the magic dagger’s hilt, Mjolnir hanging faithful from his mighty wrist. “We only ask to go finish what we started.” A last dart of pride flung with no buckling. “And time will tell if we are worthy or not.”

 _While he was gloating, sucking the tree’s life strength, he didn’t see. Nor feel. Nor know.  
As the tremors shaking the ground under his claws, while he kept on his feeding, to him were merely paltry.  
He was not meant to see, to feel, to know.  
He couldn’t see, nor feel, nor know that Nifelheim’s glaciers were starting to melt.   
That a disastrous deluge was dousing Muspelheim’s fires.  
That the dwarves of Nidavellir were turning into stone and becoming part of their own caves.  
That an eternal night was falling down on Alfheim and that a never fading sun began bursting Svartalfheim.  
That every single one of the Nine Realms was facing its own doom.  
And among the Nine Realms, Jotunheim was the only one preserved.  
But he could see the golden towers of Asgard beginning to crumple.  
He could feel that devastating, obstructing hatred slowly yielding to despair.  
And he could know now his way to _the light _was paved._

A flash.  
In time, in space.  
Growls, screams, and cracks on Thor’s smashing the frozen ground with Mjolnir, on Loki’s spear’s furious blasts against one of the giants after the other, dozens of them laying already slain, tens of their iced blows gone missing and ended in iced blocks all around, a thunderstorm of lightning, leaps, and frosty blades, and strokes of light, and frenzy. Thor and Loki were one single fury, deadly, unleashed, panting as one, shouting as one, striking as one, and made more lethal by their glaring, unearthly resolution. By the luminous awareness that thereafter they were just loosely, brightly, _definitely_ on their own.  
They couldn’t tell how long they had been fighting, nor if that fight had actually been interrupted by Odin’s meddling; they had the alienating feeling they never left the battlefield from the start, and everything in-between happened in some different time. Not that it mattered, as long as, in spite of being so largely outnumbered, they were prevailing, and prevailing easily. The pampering from the excitement for fighting, the brightness of Thor’s strength there for him only made Loki forget of his sore weakness and deal his blows with more vigour than ever.  
But still, in that glorious bloodshed, still the creature didn’t show itself.  
“Where the Hel is your hellish demon?!”, Thor shouted at some point, turning around to swing Mjolnir against the head of the giant trying to get him from behind.  
“Unleash it, you damned cowards!”, Loki echoed, tearing the three Jotuns surrounding him down in a row.  
When the nebulous, rumbling cluster grew as big as the frozen peak that towered them all right at their back, then a roar rose up louder than the whole others around.  
“Restrain your doomed souls, and listen!”   
Thor glanced at Loki, and Loki glanced at Thor, both caught by surprise. Together with their outburst, a sudden silence fell on them both, who - panting their heart straight out of their throat - didn’t lower their weapons anyway, and on the Jotuns still alive nearby. The giant who spoke stepped out of the frosty fog, towards them, wheezing hoarsely on them as he got closer. Chuckling.  
And there, the unforeseen befell.

 _“I look into your eyes and I see life, little one. The only kind of life I can conceive to keep calling mine_ life _as well. I cannot do what you’re asking me to do.”  
“I look into your eyes and I see grief, my sweetest. I don’t want to see that. I want to see the brightness which my soul feeds on at every smallest breath I take in this world.”_

“You may kill us all, son of Laufey,” the Jotun sneered on, looking into Loki’s eyes with ultimate disdain. “Until the last of our race.” His new grin sounded as sinister as the most foreboding ominous. “Things will not change anyway.” The red of his eyes burnt when he measured his next words out of his mouth. “As long as _you_ are alive.”  
More glacial than the whole Jotunheim itself, the unexpected, devastating consciousness froze Loki’s heart at once, and along with his it froze Thor’s too; they both gasped, in part still from the strain after the fight, in part from the turmoil those words unchained. Thor grabbed his brother’s arm, pulling him close to himself, and rose a freaked out gaze on the giant’s face. Who looked down at him almost amused.  
“Yes, Asgardian. To break this spell, he has to die.”  
Thor’s hand went instinctively on the dagger still fastened to his belt, and instinctively the same did Loki’s eyes; _then was Odin right from the beginning?_ , they thought at unison, terrified – even more than by the unpredicted revelation - at the farthest idea that could turn out as the truth.  
The Jotun slowly bowed his face on Thor’s, foretasting the reaction that the words he was about to speak would have wreaked in him.  
“No, Odinson. The All-Father was not right at all. Because not simply he has to die.”   
_“I look into your eyes and I see life.”_   
“He has to die in pain.”  
 _“I look into your eyes and I see grief.”_  
“And it has to be by your hand.”


	8. The gift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which starts as their most terrible night ever, Loki makes Thor the most unexpected gift.
> 
> :::
> 
> This breathtaking fanart is a gift from my friend [Lia](http://jaleenelox.deviantart.com/), who made it for me and for this fanfic. <3  
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a most pensive, intimate chapter. Lots of talking, lots of… more. As I already said, this is what I most care about, when I deal with the two of them.

The silence that fell after those words lasted forever.  
Thor could distinctly feel his brother’s anguish growing through his choked breath and through the clasp of his hand around his wrist. He tried with all the strength he carried in his heart to reassure him at once: what the Jotun just said was not a likelihood, not then, not there, nor anywhere, nor ever. Then, holding a prideful look on the mocking snigger of the giant and sticking his side against Loki’s, he spoke just a few, steadfast words.  
“This will never happen.” His voice sounded implacable. “I am quite sure you know that.”  
The Jotun slowly nodded, cynical.  
“Indeed we know, Asgardian. We count on that.” A lunatic, haughty look in his burning eyes. “We will watch all the other Realms falling, while the Casket returns where it belongs. And the glory of Jotunheim will so be restored.”

The greyness of Jotunheim tasted more bitter, and heavier, and colder after the giants vanished, leaving the two of them alone with their burden. Loki hadn’t pronounced a word since the end of the fight. Quite oddly, the awareness of that inescapable sentence didn’t sound to him as hopeless as it would if it had come just a few days earlier. But still, it sounded inescapable, and that forced his voice frozen, deep in his throat. He was confused. Puzzled, enraged, troubled as Heimdall’s words echoed in his mind, _“…your choice and your choice only will define how the universes will look after this  havoc.”_ His choice. That, together with the clear feeling of his _other self_  sucking the life from Yggdrasil, with the looming proximity of that dagger that so deviously left Odin’s hand to reach his son’s, with the alluring, vivid image of Thor fighting his own father in the name of their love… And with the desperate question that overwhelmed all the rest in his mind, _Am I so cursed, then? To such an extent that I must tug you down with me, my sweetest?_ , to which he could not find an answer. Shouting inside, he clung to those words that made him cry with disarming fondness the day he read Thor’s journal. _I only wish we both could live just on our love. Is that too a petty thing to ask?_ He grabbed his brother’s arm to be followed, his head low, his eyes on the snow squeaking under his feet, and led him across the frosty land to a narrow split in the rocks that became visible only when they got in front of it. Thor didn’t need to ask, he understood immediately that was a passage to Loki’s secret place’s part that touched Jotunheim. As he didn’t need to force him to talk, for he perfectly knew that Loki’s present mood could not allow any word out; he just respected his silence, quietly, as quietly as he walked by his side, searching for his eyes every now and then in hopes of still finding in them the confidence they carried till a bunch of hours earlier.

_They overstepped the threshold, and everything everywhere else in the Nine Realms stopped. Maybe they were aware of that from the beginning, maybe they weren’t; nevertheless, the whole time outside just froze at once. Along with it froze the air, and froze the wind, the rain, the sun; froze the dead souls and froze the Aesir gods, froze the dark beast, and people, and animals, and plants; froze the whole chaos devastating the universes, paralyzed and then suspended, in the right instant – that became timeless – everything was caught in when it occurred._

As they were safe inside that hidden part of Jotunheim, Loki looked at Thor, intensely, for a few seconds – Thor could almost hear his little brother’s thoughts eddying through that gaze -, then stepped away, alone, towards the snowy cliff that dominated the landscape in front of them.   
It was snowing, and a gentle but brisk wind made the snow dancing in little whirls all around; the incoming dusk enhanced the dazzling whiteness of the land as far as the eye could see, and in any other time Thor would have said that was among the most amazing places he had ever seen.   
_I know what’s in your mind, little one_ , he thought, while staring at Loki’s silhouette standing a bit further, backwards, against the changeling sky. _I can’t believe either we are going through all this_. He roamed around collecting the few brushwood he sought out, heaped it up thoroughly in a sheltered corner, next to a big black rock, and aimed Mjolnir on it to light a bonfire up.  
When the fire burnt high and cosy, he dropped his hammer on the ground together with his cape, that had become too heating, and walking slowly he headed for his little brother.  
Loki was now sitting on the edge of the cliff, in the snow, clasping his knees tight against his chest, his chin softly laid on them, his eyes lost away beyond the horizon. The wind was moving gently his silky hair; in the pale light of the twilight his beauty was even more ethereal, and the pensive spleen that veiled it made it almost otherworldly.  
Thor snuggled up to him, raptured and grieved at the same time, unable to turn his eyes away from his face. With the tips of his fingers, more delicate than a sigh in a foggy night, he skimmed Loki’s hair and mildly moved a lock behind his ear. He kept stroking his head, tenderly smiling, as if his strokes and smiles could erase all the bitterness from his little one’s heart. He noticed a small, bleeding cut marring the alabaster of his cheekbone, where some of those frozen blades must have sideswiped him. Closing his eyes, Thor laid his lips on the wound, and with a few soft touches of his mouth he kissed the blood away. It tasted so sweet and precious on his tongue. Then, again, he stared at Loki’s face, his thumb never stopping grazing his skin, so cold in the everlasting winter of Jotunheim. _You look so young, little one_. Without diverting his gaze from the snowy unlimited he had in front, Loki rubbed his cheek smoothly on Thor’s palm.  
“We need to talk,” Thor whispered, as warmly and sweetly as he could.  
Loki sighed.   
“We need indeed.”  
And then they remained silent, for a long while, like neither of them could find the least laborious words to start with, though knowing the issue had to be faced. Thor’s hand was still skimming Loki’s cheek, and his heart bleeding, on his little brother’s mute, resigned anguish.  
As if he had to deal with the heaviest thing ever, he took the dagger off his belt and hold it on his palm, looking at it. There, Loki too finally moved his eyes on the weapon, that flared with snooty conceit.  
“It’s a beautiful blade,” he said, sombrely.  
“Yes.” Thor calibrated his voice, to assure him there was not even the farthest chance in the whole time and space that he could change his mind eventually. “One I am never going to use.”  
Loki didn’t seem to hear his words. He absently noticed, on the changeling glare of the blade, some writings appearing and disappearing, too fast to let him even try to read them.  
“That’s why that dagger came into your hand. Because you are the only one who’s meant to use it.”  
Again, Thor’s voice in the breeze, deep, assertive.  
“But I never will.”  
A pale smile on Loki’s lips, his eyes still low, his hand quietly reaching Thor’s to tangle his own fingers with his brother’s on the dagger’s hilt.  
“I'm afraid it's not up to you to decide that.” _And I should have known_ , he added to himself. _I should have known they would have saved for me the most ruthless of all punishments_. He felt a sudden lump in his throat, for he couldn’t even think of the eternal damnation Thor would have sentenced himself to, if…   
“No,” Thor interrupted his stream of thoughts, categorical. He put the dagger back at his belt and grabbed Loki’s nape, sturdily and tenderly at once. “We will figure out something.”  
Without rising his gaze, Loki searched for his brother’s hand again, that strong, warm, reassuring hand now laden with all the most terrifying omens.  
“Heimdall said there is only one way to end this.” He kept staring vacantly at the twine of their fingers, his ones looking so sheer and thin, mingled to Thor’s. So different, those hands, and yet so uniquely matching. So beautiful when they were melded together. “And if… if it is written that to end this I have to die, I can’t think of a sweeter way than by your hand.”  
Thor strengthened his grasp on Loki’s neck.  
“I said...” His eyes fixed on Loki’s lids, still lowered. “I will never do it.” A shadow of sadness in his voice, vaguely blurring his obduracy. “It is as simple as that.”  
Secluded together with his little one from the whole rest of reality in that bubble of timeless eternity, suspended inside the absence of everything else but the two of them, Thor had the gut sensation that his entire life flowed in a single, crystal waterfall of images right before his eyes. From his child’s plays to the most terrible ordeals he had to face and through the most delightful moments until that present instant, Loki was always there, in each one of those overlapping flashes, for better or for worse. Loki, the only real substantial component in his entire existence, past, present, and future even more. He had the lucid certainty, he saw it as revealed truth. That was not meant to be changed, not anymore. And his words just came out instinctively, directly from that vision and directly from his heart.  
“You know, Loki… since when we were boys… so many times when I just looked at you… I had to restrain myself from pitching into you and kissing you consumed…”  
He felt Loki shivering with tenderness, as if he caught those same flashes exactly at the same time.  
“And so many times, Thor, when I just looked at you… and saw you smiling… I felt like being stabbed into my soul…”  
“…stabbed, little one?”  
“Yes. Because more than your perfect might, more than your perfect beauty,… the sweetness of your smile has always been the only thing that could make me feel disarmed… and all I could think was… ‘Why can’t I be his chosen one, and he be mine? Is that really so unconceivable?’” He looked towards the horizon, swinging softly, distant. An endless while, before he let his next words out. “Maybe it is.”  
Thor clasped his shoulder, trembling, he shook him lightly. A kiss, on his forehead. “Don’t you dare.” On his temple. “To think such a thing.” On his cheek. “As long as I am alive.”  
He waited for an answer that didn’t come.  
“Now that I have you, Loki, now that you have me, I know there is no other fate meant for us but being one. And you know it as well, don’t even try to say you don’t.” His nose skimmed Loki’s ear, as he spoke right on his skin. “A spell cannot destroy what we have conquered.”  
So tempting, as every single time, Thor’s muffled touch, so compelling, and so… _right_. As right as were Thor’s words. Rationally, unquestionably right. They were meant to be one, and being one they were meant to re-write their own lives, to re-write history. _A spell cannot actually destroy what we are meant to be_. But, paradoxically, he clearly felt that was not the point. _Why do I have to die, then?_ While he was trying to steer his troubled soul, he couldn’t help but indulging to Thor’s mouth, mildly brushing his lobe. _It’s so hard to make my mind clear, he thought, I need to focus on too many things, when I’d just wish to focus on your lips._  
“Yet it’s a spell,” he murmured, when he was able to recapture reality. “A spell that they managed so well to make me powerless against.” He shook his head, ruefully. “Take a look, Thor.”  
He moved his hand in the void in front of them and the sky was suddenly invaded by a new landscape, like through a huge window opened on a new dimension. There, like ghoulish paintings hanging in the gallery of doom, visions. Terrifying, ruinous visions petrified in time while befalling, one after another.   
“Nifelheim.”  
Mountains, midair avalanches, motionless glaciers captured while turning into waterfalls and plummeting downstream, devastating.  
A mild gesture of his hand, as though he leafed through the pages of a book. Millennial fires wiped out by a hellish storm.   
“Muspelheim.”  
Silent screams impressed on countless still faces. Frozen stampede. Mute panic in innumerable shapes. Dozens of fleeing dwarves brutally stopped to be subsumed randomly into the rocks around.  
“Nidavellir.”  
Voiceless whimpers and agonizing moans, a deadly darkness caught and frozen while inexorably overpowering the brilliance of the most brilliant of the Realms.  
“Alfheim.”  
Golden pillars crashing under unceasing earthquakes, and their debris halted in mid air while ruining down. A herd of his dark nemeses, now motionless, surrounding Odin’s palace. Closer to the Casket than ever before. Warriors, frozen while falling like autumn leaves in the last ditch to stop them.  
“And Asgard.”  
He closed his fist, and just as it appeared the window vanished.  
“Yggdrasil is being blighted, the Realms are in chaos, the plague of that deadly curse is swamping, because… because of me, and I don’t… I…”  
The endless discouragement Thor caught in Loki’s voice induced him to take his brother’s head in his hands and make him lift his gaze on his own face.  
“Look at me, Loki.”   
As green and blue got soaked together, they both felt the sudden crave for sweeping that dreadful apocalypse away and forget everything. And remained hung up to each other’s look for a long instant.  
“We can remain here, safe, for now,” Thor said, fervently. “Or even forever. You said no-one will find us here. And as long as we are here, we can rule time as well, right? Put everything at a standstill…”  
Loki’s long eyelashes fluttered smoothly as he wrapped his brother in a disenchanted glance.  
“Time is re-writing itself right on our moves. I cannot tell if _now_ is still actually now. Maybe it’s before, maybe it’s after. And maybe everything happening now actually never did. Or never will. Or already did.” So tenderly sad, his smile caressing Thor’s heart. “We could remain here, yes. We could. But things can’t be kept in a deadlock forever.” So sadly calm, his eyes laying on Thor’s soul. “Time _waits_ for us. For _me_. As does the fate of all Realms. And I don’t… I don’t think I can live on knowing that I did… nothing.”  
Thor’s lips trembled at the determined sweetness of Loki’s voice, and the tears he held back until that moment suddenly filled his eyes.  
“And what should I do then?”, he muttered. “Just… just stick this damned dagger into your heart and watch you dying? To save all lives in the Realms… by taking yours?”  
Loki tilted his head a bit, pierced by those tears more painfully than he’d have ever been by any dagger. He couldn’t add to them any more words. Thor’s hands were so warm again on his iced cheeks, his eyes so desperate, his voice almost broken.  
“I look into your eyes and I see life, little one.” He kept his woeful, dismayed look enchained deep into Loki’s. “The only kind of life I can conceive to keep calling mine _life_ as well.” His head denying, his eyes denying, his whole body, his whole soul denying. “I cannot do what you’re asking me to do.”  
On his restrained snuffle and his wholehearted words Loki shivered with grievous fondness and never dying lust, and the back of his fingers delicately wiped the tears off from his brother’s cheeks.  
“I look into your eyes and I see grief, my sweetest.” A smile, a little kiss, a pleading sigh. “I don’t want to see that.” His hands right on Thor’s chest. “I want to see the brightness which my soul feeds on at every smallest breath I take in this world.”  
There, Thor put his arms around him and grabbed him desperately, holding his head tight against his neck, cheered up a bit in feeling him breathing on his skin. He needed so much to nestle him as close to himself as possible, just cradling him at the pulse of his heartbeat. And keep him there forever.  
The breeze too lulled them both for a while, in perfect synch with their hearts, as though the whole place around was trying to seduce them, _Yes, just remain here, it is so easy, just remain here until time carries no more meaning_.  
“I know it looks like everything is pulling us both towards a pit of damnation,” Thor whispered on his hair at the end, now calmly, without loosening his grip. “The Jotuns, the spell, that… creature, and Odin, and… everything.” Once more, he lifted his head gently to look into his eyes. “And if you ask me why all this is happening, I do not have an answer. But I know I will never harm you.” _I’ll keep on telling you that again and again, until my voice extinguishes_. He pushed his eyes so deeply into Loki’s that Loki felt them grasping his heart. “I do not care what we will have to face, be it the Ragnarok itself. I will never, ever harm you.” _I’d rather end my own life_. “We will find another way.”  
He took the dagger from his belt, raised it a bit in front of both their eyes and then, with a deep snarl of rage, he threw it off the cliff. They held their breath and watched it falling, falling, until it disappeared down in the abyss, both nervous at first and then more and more relieved. They waited a while, still, with bated breath, almost afraid to see it jumping back up from that bottomless gulf.  
But it did not.   
Thor smiled, their gazes now sunk in one another’s, their mouths skimming each other’s; they yielded to each other’s scent and kissed, slowly, with boundless care.  
“That’s it. And by the way,” Thor said, re-emerging from that kiss, “Heimdall talked to me as well. I am sure he can help.”  
In the snowy dusk falling all around, wrapped in a cloak of unnatural silence, Loki’s pensiveness garnered the shades of a pale expectation, still mottled by vague drops of hesitancy.  
“Maybe,” he muttered. He rubbed Thor’s lips with his thumb, tenderly. “Yes, maybe.” He smiled glumly. “But magic still calls magic. If I still had my powers… magic would be the only infallible chance.”  
Sitting side by side on the edge of the cliff, their legs dangling over the chasm below, while Thor’s arm surrounded Loki’s waist, keeping him close and warm, Loki leant his head softly on Thor’s shoulder.  
Magic.  
The calmness all around, the gentle breeze, the silence and the candid vastness of the landscape, together with the tender hug they were locked into, induced the angst to fade slowly into a trembling serenity. After all, in that reshuffling time that had no guidance, they still had all the time; after all, they still were gods, and as gods they had the means to manage their destiny, to try at least; after all, they had their _love_. And against that, nothing could ever win.  
“Tell me about magic, little one.”  
Thor spoke softly in the wind, as if he was asking for a revelation.  
“Magic is an alluring, tasty gift.” Loki’s voice sounded as soft as the snowflakes falling over their heads and melting an instant before skimming their hair. “And a ravaging curse.”  
“…a curse?”   
Vaguely distracted, Thor murmuring those lightly startled words. He was just dreaming himself away sensing his brother’s skin under the clothes his fingers were rubbing smoothly on his hip.  
“Being a master of magic made me the God of Mischief,” Loki answered, his words blended with shrouded self-acrimony. “A trickster people learned never to trust. And I’d say rightfully, until… until I _found_ you.” It occurred to him just at that point, it was the first time he talked of _that part_ of himself in such a way. “Sometimes I think my life would be way better, if I never regain my magic powers.” In such a clear and conscious way. “But then, I realize my magic powers also make me… me.”  
“You’re right,” Thor went. “I like to think of you as of… my little trickster.” He giggled. “And we both know how much your little tricks can be… intriguing.”  
Thor livened inside when at his last words Loki winked at him whit his usual, adorable sassy face.  
“If… _when_ I get my powers back…” Loki ran the tip of his index drawing his profile, from the middle of his forehead along his nose, his lips, his chin, his throat. “I swear you…” He stopped on the neckline of his vest. “…I’m going to use them only to intrigue you more than I ever did.”  
Then he fell silent, bewitched in turn at the bewitched gaze Thor kept on his twinkly eyes. _We will find another way, yes_ , he thought, and turned himself a bit to rise his leg and put it over Thor’s thigh, his knee against his flank, his foot behind his back. _Of course we will_. He smiled with irrepressible lust as his brother placed his hand on his thigh, overwhelmed by his yearning fever, that mad, delightful fever in front of which everything else, including death, could wait.  
He ran his fingers through Thor’s golden hair, basking.  
“I’d never thought it would have been so easy.”  
Thor frowned, candidly, perplexed.  
“What, little one?”  
“Becoming something I didn’t fathom I could ever become.”  
Thor smiled on him, getting the point at once, his eyes shining with irrefutable obviousness.  
“They say that opposites match, don’t they?”  
A loving smile coloured Loki’s mouth.  
“That’s a bit prosaic if referred to us, my sweetest, but yes, so they say.”  
“And when they match, they must also blend to one another.”  
Loki nodded, almost staggered by the glaring patency of that statement.  
“I guess so.”  
So naturally plain, Thor’s following words, so sweet his voice whispering them right on his brother’s lips.  
“Then, no wonder if it has been so easy.”  
And there, as two tiny tears welled up in his eyes, Loki grabbed him in his arms, _just hold me, and everything will be alright_.  
“Oh, Thor, please, never stop telling me things like you just did,” he stuttered on his neck. “Never stop being such an amazing _you_. Never stop being here for me, with me. Being mine, and letting me be yours. Because if you do… that would be the only possible way to kill me.”  
In the cold twilight that seemed to hesitate to turn into an even colder night, they kissed, smoothly, and kissed, and kissed, unable to get sated, just that, for minutes, for ages.  
 _Here… we have all the time in the universes._  
The bonfire crackled discreet behind their backs and the frozen expanse they had in front, melting afar into the violet shades of the dimming sky, looked unending when they rose their sight again to the horizon.   
“Is this… this place of yours really endless as it seems?”  
Thor whispered his words in the pungent wind, lingering on the tricks that the blue light of the falling night played on the face of his brother, who raised his hand open against the sky and almost caressed the air, like he was touching a transient living thing having the power to rule its existence.   
“It depends from which point of view you look at it.”  
An enraptured smile showed up on Thor’s face.  
“Tell me about endlessness.”  
Loki’s eyes twinkled in Thor’s with a glint of smugness, while he withdrew his hand and closed his lids, calling all the strength he had left to enliven a small shimmering globe right on his palm. _My inner self is not entirely dead, then_ , he though in a soft rush of relish, and handed the tiny glaring ball out to his brother.  
“Endlessness is just a dull sparkle of light, or darkness, when you can hold it on the palm of your hand.”  
Then, with a smile, smirking at him, he blew softly on the little thing, that vanished in a million microscopical specks of cosmic dust. When the very last sparkle disappeared, he turned himself a bit, to sit more comfortable between Thor’s legs and lay his back languidly on his brother’s bosom.   
How entrancing, Thor pondered cuddling him in his arms and staring at him with renewed wonder, that in the rare, precious shell of that enchanting body, outwardly so young, and frail, and so made to be just fondled and loved, such a huge plenty of knowledge, of mystery, of arcane power was harboured. He tightened his grip around Loki’s waist and took a deep sigh right on his neck.  
“You… you are something I cannot think I might lose, little one.” He shivered. “Not in a million years.”  
Stirring words and strokes and words and kisses they talked and talked, until the sky glided into the deepest blue, trying to figure out what was the purpose the heavens sat aside for them; and while talking, careless of the snow timidly freezing their bodies through the clothes, and ranging from the present chaos to history, to jokes, to legends and to poems, they almost forgot the axe still impending on their heads.  
“…and tell me about the most incredible story you ever read,” Thor ended on the pining delight of Loki’s body breathing soft memories on his own.  
Loki turned his head and reached his eyes.  
“That story is still being written.” He smiled, begging for a new kiss. “It’s the one I’m living now, here, with you.”  
On the disarming echo of those words they kissed again, keenly, grinding to ashes the whole corpus of tales of gods and heroes ever written, everywhere in the Realms, in every time.  
 _Here… we have all the time in the universes._  
That was reassuring.  
So, they didn’t rush, they just enjoyed their staying in one another’s arms, wrapped by the frosty land glimmering timeless in the night; they talked on lightly, venturing all the possible guesses about their own next future, encouraged after they both got the evidence that Loki’s powers were not completely lost, or that at least he seemed to have strength enough to retrieve them. So far, even the magic sleep spared him its torment.   
“When we decide to go, we’ll have also to deal with the chance the All-Father comes after us again,” Loki stated at some point, making Thor startle.  
“I… I can’t put into words how mortified and furious I am for his madness.”  
“Don’t be. Odin is not worthy of your anger.” Loki brushed himself on Thor’s body, smoothly, and put his arms under his thighs, holding them tight against his hips. “You were so hot when you confronted him.”  
He felt Thor trembling at his words, a bit embarrassed and a lot appeased, he felt his manhood vibrating through the clothes and he gloated inside.  
“Was I?”, Thor wallowed with a big, transparent smile.  
“Oh, yes.” Loki took his hand, ogling, and drove it between his own legs. “Look what happens to me if I just think of it.”  
“You little…” Thor grabbed his hardening sex roughly through the fabric, getting stiff on his little brother’s irrepressible moan. “We really… should plan… our next move…” And he bit his neck, and searched for his mouth, and plunged into it while his hand slipped under Loki’s pants.  
“We should… indeed.” Loki tightened his thighs on Thor’s hand and lapsed into his arms. Not because he was reckless. Nor because Thor was.  
On the contrary.  
Because they became simply invincible when they got lost into each other’s arms.  
 _“You should indeed.”_  
He froze at once, as he clearly heard the voice. Again, just in his mind.  
“…H-Heimdall?”, he gasped, his tongue still entwined to Thor’s.  
On Thor’s disoriented look and on his own broken sighs, he gently stopped his brother’s hand and panted all his reluctance right on his mouth, unable to separate his lips from his sweet god’s.  
 _“Now.”_  
He stood up in the snow, vaguely peeved, holding Thor’s hand and pushing him upright as well, without stopping to kiss him.   
“Looks like we have to go.” And yet he could not come unstuck from his brother’s lips. “He’s calling.”  
 _“You alone, Loki.”_  
He winced. He smiled sweetly at Thor’s frowning, he led him nearby the bonfire and there he laid both his hands on his chest, almost touched at the movement of his pectorals while breathing.  
“He says… you have to wait me here. Perhaps we are close to the way out.” Again he kissed his lips, with no hurry, because there he was the ruler of time. “It will not take me long, my sweetest.”

A couple of hours passed, or it might be just some minutes, but it looked like an eternity to Thor. Nearby the bonfire, he was now wearing just his vest when Loki, smiling softly, finally reappeared and moved his steps to his brother, who stood up at once and walked towards him; Loki’s eyes were studded with deep, steady awareness, like he now knew the answer to all things.  
“…so?”, Thor nudged him, his voice trembling with concern.  
An inch from his mouth, Loki smiled again, tickling him with the sleek grass of his gaze.  
“So, you were right. Heimdall _did_ help.” Leaning languidly on his brother’s body, he put his arms around his hips. “But.” He pre-empted any Thor’s question laying a long kiss on his mouth. “Whatever is meant to happen from now on, let’s just forget to think about it until tomorrow. And make this night unending.”  
The gauzy confidence of Loki’s voice, while he gently took off Thor’s robe with the lightest nonchalance, clashed smoothly with the puzzled apprehension Thor could not entirely hold back.   
“…meant to happen, little one? What is that you foresee and I cannot?”  
Loki laid the tip of his index on his lips.  
“Shush. I’ve got a gift for you.” A captivating look on his face. “Close your eyes until I tell you.”  
Thor looked at him with a wavering smile.  
“Loki…”  
“Come on, close your eyes. You won’t be disappointed.”  
Minutes of silence, after Thor complied, slightly restive. The soft swish of clothes being unhooked and falling on the ground. Eagerness. A soft sound, almost inaudible, the whisper of a lost soul coming from the Afterlife. Then, Loki’s velvety words.  
“You may watch, now.”  
“Finally!” Thor uttered. “Wh…” And his voice died in his throat.   
The first thing that hit his heart with a blaze of wonder were his eyes. Burning smoothly with a glaring red, two little drops from the sunset sky that winded them while they loved for the first time in Loki’s secret place, they were oozing lust and desire and complacency in such a new and unexpected way that Thor could not even put a single sound together to assemble a single word and let it out of his mouth. At the same time, the miracle coming true again in Loki’s body prevented him from moving a single muscle, even if they weren’t farther than a few inches from each other. It was just a blurry memory the vision of Loki’s _other form_ Thor had the day he went to save him from the Jotuns; and that day, the occurring tragedy allowed no time to any further emotion. Now, his little one was there, an epiphany from the Land of Unfathomable Dreams, dressed only of his bare, unbelievable _blue_. So _blue_. And so. So. Hurtfully. Beautiful. His face was still the same and yet it wasn’t, his teeth so white under those tempting lips, way darker than his skin; his hair looked even longer, and blacker, and silkier, in the cold breeze that brushed them. All around, the whiteness of the snow made an amazing contrast, being at the same time so fitting with Loki’s Jotun look. And at that point Thor realized through and through the prodigy that his little one really embodied: he was the perfect meld between winter and spring, between eerie and elegance, between mystery and carnality. He was the deftness of mind and the shadows of magic tempering the monolithic steadiness of Thor’s strength, he was the changeling wind gently caressing the lightning granite that Thor was made of. He was the perfect balance between two breeds that apparently had nothing else in common since the beginning of time except the urge to kill each other off. _You and me together would make the perfect kings for us all_ , Thor though almost without seeing that patency coming all of a sudden up in his mind, along with the uncontrollable feelings rushing all across his veins and bones while he kept staring at his brother’s body.  
His body. His whole new body was a poem, a whispered symphony, a fresco, and his skin… Oh, his skin. The same features that made the Jotun giants so creepy because of their hugeness, in him, born Aesir size, turned out breathtaking. Those precious, paler marks running all over his limbs in such enchanting drawings, from his forehead down along his cheeks, and neck, and shoulders, and arms. Sliding so elegant on his chest, where his tiny nipples stood out in a darker shade of blue, and from there on his tummy, all around his navel, and further down on his palpitating groin, and even on his cuddly, adorable sex. And down and down, in swirls and lines on the blue of his legs, down to his graceful feet half dipped in the snow and apparently sensing no cold. Following the lovely curve of his nates, those thin stripes – were they tattoos? Paintings? Scars? - ran on along his back, tunefully matching the profile of his muscles and perfectly blending in the rest of his bluer skin.  
Thor could distinctly smell the scent of that blue, and that was enough to drive him mad.   
Loki was just rascally smiling, all silent, stuck into his brother’s eyes and enjoying every single sign that being caught so pleasantly unprepared sketched on Thor’s expression. He felt so gratified. That speechless, astonished look on Thor’s face was among the sweetest and most seducing things he ever saw in his life.  
“Do you like what you see?”, he smirked, and his glimpse fell bawdy between Thor’s legs. “Oh, I guess so. Your pants are getting way too tight, and you’re just looking at me.”  
Glancing down an instant at his own hard-on and then wrapping him again in his dreamy gaze, almost clumsily, Thor finally managed to pull some shaky words out of his mouth.  
“Oh, little one… are you… even real?”  
“Of course I am,” Loki giggled, taking his hand. “Don’t be so shocked, I am still me.”  
Holding Loki’s right hand in his, like he was dealing with the most rare and priceless piece of art, Thor lost himself again staring at it.  
“You are still you…”, he parroted, grazing those black nails with his thumb’s pad, ecstatically. Anew he raised his look into those sparkling, improbable red eyes. “Sometimes… sometimes I hardly believe I am so privileged I can call you mine.”  
“But I am,” Loki murmured on his entrancement. “Yours.”   
Thor took that hand to his cheek and kept it there, surprised in feeling it way colder than he ever expected. As his blue skin was, stunningly, under the bashful grazing of Thor’s fingertips. Colder than the deepest abyss in the deepest seaway. Colder than the farthest star in the farthest space.  
“You… you are made of skies and seas.”  
Loki tilted his head, enchanted in turn and touched at the unpredicted matching of his own skin’s and Thor’s iris’s blue. He always thought of his Jotun nature as of a curse, he always hated it like an infection, a disease threatening his true self, that he always felt being just his Aesir part. But now, having in front of him a speechless Thor, entranced by the matchless preciousness of his beauty, now… now he liked it. He liked the communion with the snow, and with the cold, that he felt becoming integral part of his own blood. He liked the frozen wind caressing him and giving him a paradoxical and cosy sense of warming. He liked the utter way his treasured one was liking it.  
“I am made of the colour of your eyes,” he purred, playing with the closeness of their lips without letting them touch. “Now…” He breathed within an inch from kissing him, arousing thus the fever of their lust. “…would you mind to stop staring at me like a dumb and…” The cute little cloud of his breath, frozen in a frozen night, blew even more sensual than his voice right into Thor’s mouth, when he whispered those two last words. “…taste me?”  
There, almost shyly, Thor put two fingers under Loki’s chin and made him rise his face a little bit, tarrying a while more beholding him intensely; then closed his eyes and leant his lips on Loki’s, carefully, inebriated by the new fragrance of his scent and unable to think anything further.   
“You are… so cold…” The flavour of his tongue reminded him of iced clouds and snowdrops, his skin smelled of black grape and winter brooks, “…so…”, while he softly interchanged glances, and airy touches, and little laps, and kisses, delving the twirly marks running on Loki’s cheekbones, “…cold…”, and on his neck, and throat, and shoulders.  
It was so… new. For both of them, it was so new. It was a whole brand new land of sensations. Every single time their making love was peerless, and different, and new; but never as new as it was now. If Thor was amazed by the unusual coldness of Loki’s skin, and by its incredible colour, and by the outlandish look sparkling in his eyes, Loki too in that form felt Thor’s touch warmer and more intriguing than ever before. And together with that, a most delightful finding. The marks embroidering his body, so softly brushed and kissed, gave him some unexpected feelings, making him more… sensitive, more receptive. He shuddered even into his own stomach. A stroke, a kiss, even a blow, each sensation was enhanced through those marks, and… and his whole body started reacting as a sounding board. Thor noticed that, it was manifest from the tickled look on his face. And the plenitude of his shining beauty, caught in that unique situation, so _innocently_ astonished, was… overwhelming.   
Loki breathed softly, listening to Thor’s tongue gradually discovering, curious and delighted, the pale blue of his arms; the hugeness of the love he felt flowing through those wet strokes was almost hurting, and he laid a wadding kiss right in the hollow between Thor’s clavicle and armpit, putting into that kiss all the sweetness, all the fondness, all the devotion he was capable of, as if he suddenly had the need to be trusted more than Thor ever did. _Whatever is meant to happen from now on_ , he recaptured that sentence in his mind, _…it is not meant against us. It is meant_ for _us._ Thor didn’t see the tear that ran, silent, bitter, down on Loki’s cheek along with that kiss. _Believe me, my sweetest_. Loki shivered and let a deep sigh out when his brother bent slowly on his knees to make his tongue’s way along his tummy, _…just… believe me_ , while his sex aroused, his glans softly brushing Thor’s cheek. His hands languidly resting on Loki’s nates, Thor laid countless kisses on that scented blue shaft, without taking it in his mouth yet, touched by every smallest thrill his tongue kindled across Loki’s body. Then he drove him down on his knees too, in the snow, gently, and again lost his gaze on his face, scoping the surreal rubies of his eyes with an enraptured smile, still incredulous. _How can you not adore this side of yourself, my little… Jotun one?_ Both his hands on Loki’s cheeks, both his thumbs skimming his lips.  
“You are… beyond belief, Loki…” He felt his own heart was about to explode in his throat. “Did anyone… ever take you… in this form?”  
The memory of the rape was still burning deep inside Loki’s soul, but he smiled sweetly at Thor’s words and wrapped his brother’s thumbs in his mouth, gloating at that instinctive, irrepressible rush of jealousy that made him so… _Thor_.  
“Not that I was willing to.” His hand under Thor’s hair, he fondled his brother’s nape, mildly. “You are the first one… and only.” He sensually sprawled on the iced mantle, drawing Thor down with him. On him. “So, please… take me… and do to me whatever pleases you most.”  
At that point, Thor couldn’t hold his arousal and fell down at his side, his fingers twisted with Loki’s, the cold of the snow on his own skin making him chill for a second and then suddenly turn into a burning flow of desire. He slowly let go of Loki’s hand to brush his arm, deliriously eager and yet yearning to be the sweetest, the most delicate, the slowest he could to make those dreamy instants eternal. Trying to contain his panting, that was getting faster together with Loki’s, he kept his gaze fixed in his brother’s while he ran his fingers, softly, all along his chest, and flank, and leg, exploring the fascinating newness of that body. How smooth. They were both breathing fog in the frozen night, eased down on the snow that wasn’t freezing anymore under their bare skin, the bonfire meekly gabbling feebler and feebler a few steps afar. No other sound around except that, and their sighs, and Loki’s blue body quivering in the whiteness like a painting coming alive under Thor’s strokes.   
Without letting Loki’s eyes go and on his hastening breathing, Thor grabbed a little handful of snow, he squeezed it in his fingers and carefully apposed it to his nipple, that was smoothly trembling, so dark, so graceful, not touching it yet, just melting in pleasure on his little brother half-opening his mouth and rushing his wheezing.   
“I could come…” Loki panted, his lips trembling. “…just thinking of you…” The cold of the snow, in Thor’s hand, so close. “…playing with my nipples…” So _familiar_. “…you’re ruining me…” His gasp sounded as a plea. “…and I so want…” _Do it then, do it_.  “…to be ruined…”  
As the snow finally skimmed it, that nipple got stiff at once and Loki choked a desperate sigh arching his back, unable to control the excitement that drove his erection mad. That induced Thor to continue, more lustfully, more thoroughly, until the snow thawed into the last drop, and then to replace it with his mouth, that almost burnt like fire on Loki’s skin right after the ice. Blackberries, and mead, and rainy roses, all those flavours mixed up onto Thor’s tongue while its tip whetted that tiny pulsing jewel. He sucked that nipple for minutes, and minutes, and minutes, more and more aroused in feeling it becoming more and more turgid together with Loki’s muffled yelps, he kept on sucking, and nipping, he sucked so hard that Loki could not hold a prolonged whimper when all the rest of his body was passed through by a tangle of little shocks that made him quiver without control and bend his knees a bit, instinctively, against Thor’s stomach. It was so wonderfully galling, so delightfully hurting. Thor sucked even harder, his fingers tickling and squeezing Loki’s other nipple, Loki’s hands grabbed Thor’s hair, desperately, his head rising, his spine tensing, _Don’t stop, don’t stop_ , a hundred lovely needles stinging him everywhere, his moans louder and louder, _Don’t… stop_ , his breath broken, until he cried out, he exhaled, he spilled on his own belly, and cried, and spilled, and cried, and spilled, softer, and softer, and softer.  
Loki’s semen was milk on the blue of his still panting tummy, and Thor let go of his nipple only to lean his craving lips on that milk and nurse it intently, drop after drop, with measured worship. It was the sweetest nectar in the universes that he was flavouring, it was his love, it was his life, it was his everything; he wasn’t out to waste a bead of it, and wanted it to last until forever. Loki felt that through his pores, and quivered with helpless ecstasy at each one of Thor’s sips, smiling scornful against the dark above, _No-one, nothing has the means to steal all this from us_ , Thor’s mouth and tongue being so hot on his frozen skin that he thought they were about to melt it, _not a spell, not the All-Father, not even death_ , Thor’s hair like drizzling gold on his nightly chest while his fingers confusedly entangled in them, _and I love you, I love you, I love you_. And he realized it was the first time he shouted that, even inside himself, the first time ever. _I love you_. It came out wild, tempestuous, devastating, like those three little words he never told anyone before in his whole life were the only ones left and worthy to be thought. _I love you_ , he cried inside again and again, on Thor taking his still trembling sex in his mouth not to let his excitement extinguish and to make him bask with no break and to just enjoy his pleasure unconditionally. As the river in flood of that magma of feelings went overflowing, he just couldn’t… he just couldn’t manage it. Swift tears filled his eyes, while he let himself get lost in Thor’s blanketing lips and in the warming fog gradually blurring his mind; Thor’s hand gently widened his legs to rub his inner thigh, and following the lines that drew those palpitating marks his fingertips reached his rim, that was so soft, and almost breathing as it bloomed compliantly to house Thor’s fingers in. Thor slightly let him out of his mouth, smiling with surprise when he felt him so cold even inside – he almost climaxed at the thought he was about to taste that unexpected cold with his own manhood -, and shivering without control, and completely at the mercy of his hand. He slid his gaze slowly all along that slender body trembling all blue, pushing his fingers deeper and deeper with no rush, just dosing his shoves on Loki’s broken moans, and gasps, and shudders. He put his other arm under his back and lifted him a bit, to hold him tighter to his bosom and look into his eyes while he kept on his skilful fingering, his free hand reached the first one from behind, fingers joined fingers in those enchanting pokes and there Loki grabbed Thor’s biceps, tensing all up, gaping, eyes chained to his brother’s, his whole life hanging on those sweet questing hands.   
“I want to make you come a thousand times,” Thor whispered on his trembling lips, his fingers touching that inmost point he knew so well Loki couldn’t resist to. “And just stare at your lovely little face while you are coming.”   
Loki’s whole body shook convulsively, and he poured himself again, defenceless, clung to his brother’s arms and locked into his eyes, just at the softness of his voice saying those words.  
What happened after that flung them both into a stormy dimension where nothing was anymore palpable except the two of them overthrowing any border that even godly eroticism might boast. Everything started – or better still, went on – calmly at first, on Thor’s fingers and tongue investigating yearningly all the surprises that body set aside for him and making Loki cry out his moans more madly than ever, for that was a vortex of pleasures he never explored before; little by little, then, moans, and fingers, and tongues, and hands, and feet, and sexes just ran wild getting muddled together in a jungle of climaxes, no break, no breath, beyond any control and beyond reason. Oh, what a devastating torridity, Loki’s amplified perceptions desperately hankering for more, and more, and more; such a flooding frenzy that Thor actually made him come a thousand times, and then a thousand times they came together, Thor inside Loki, Loki inside Thor, and in each other’s throat, and on each other’s face, and chest, and back, and tummy; getting muddled with the snow, and with the night, and with their own frantic groans, they lost awareness of time, of space, of where their bodies ended and where started their souls. They mixed to that laughs and tears, they stirred to that wild kisses, and windy bites, and scratches; they explored and conquered and overshot the ultimate erotic edges of one another’s body, letting their minds, letting their souls themselves become one with their own unfettered Ragnarok of pleasure, and shipwreck unbridled into a sea of giddiness they never ever sailed before.   
They didn’t know how long that thunderstorm of swiving lasted, they didn’t care, they didn’t need to care; they just needed it to last as long as possible, and only when they both fell down exhausted, stunned, both their heads aching, all their muscles hurting, both unable to tell if their climaxes faded to an end at last or if that was just a new starting, only then they chilled out, melted in each other’s arms, panting their own hearts out on each other’s skin.  
When Loki found a blurry way to follow in that immense and undefined cloud of rapture, he just forced his voice out in a shivery whisper, without moving a single corner of his body from the clasp of Thor’s arms.  
“Thor… Thor.” He filled his nostrils with the scent of their blended semen, he sighed, he smiled. “How sweet it sounds, your name.” He felt his brother’s grasp getting more tight. “…Thor.” His lids still hooded on the ravishing flux that kept both of their bodies hanging over a hazy in-between. “This… is not something… you can simply call sex…” Thor’s lips were resting on his neck, warm, mushy. “This… _something_ … may happen only… between the two of us…” Their arms bent on his chest, their fingers woven together. “This is the two of us… becoming everything… everywhere… in every time…” The smooth, warm blanket of Thor’s body sheeted him in a cosmic tangle of safety. “… and you are right… how could any other thing in any world… have enough power… to destroy it?”  
Embraced placid on the snow and with the snow still falling, they didn’t budge at all, waiting in silence on the wave of those words vanishing in the night. After a while, Loki felt a shy chill running across his brother’s body.  
“Are you… feeling cold?”   
Thor just cuddled him tighter, he did have no intention to let him go, not even to stoke the bonfire up. He just stretched one arm blindly around to grab their capes and throw them upon their bodies, nestling closer to him under the fabric.  
“A bit…”, he answered softly. “I guess… you’re not.”  
Loki smiled, tenderly brushing his frozen buttocks against Thor’s groin.  
“Not when I wear… this form.”  
They were lying on their flank, Loki’s back stuck to Thor’s thorax, their legs bent against one another’s, their feet brushing each other’s, their arms still entwined together around Loki’s waist. Breathing softly. So pleasantly worn out. So ultimately peaceful. Their minds still unable to distinguish where reality laid. If some worthy reality still existed now.  
“Little one…” Thor spoke right on his brother’s hair, wet from the snow and smelling grass and seashells. “…have you ever thought… when this is all over… we could bugger off everything and be just… us, just… Thor and Loki?”  
“You mean like… to Hel with godhood, just Thor and Loki, lovers, bound together beyond the end of time itself?”  
Thor nodded on his nape, breathing his scent, making him shiver.  
“Living in some lost place, where no-one knows who we really are.”  
“No more fights, no more troubles, no more killing?”  
His nose grazing Loki’s neck, his lips skimming his shoulder, Thor sighed on him all his craving for such an outlying fancy.  
“And no more Odin, no Jotunheim, no duties to fulfil on someone else’s behalf.”  
Loki just blinked, listening to the night, and smiled.  
“I dream of that since the first night we loved, my sweetest.”  
The sleep delayed to come, as though they both wished to defer endlessly that dark tomorrow they felt so inescapable. _I only wish we both could live just on our love. Is that too a petty thing to ask, for two like us who were born gods?_ No, Loki answered in his mind, no, because if there existed a most decisive evidence of their deity that was their love. No, Thor echoed him, no, because such an ultimate love could only incarnate an ultimate worthiness of willing.   
“Loki…”  
On Thor blowing his name behind his ear, Loki just turned his head a bit and brushed his cheek against his brother’s lips.   
“Loki, I need to know… what Heimdall told you.”  
Trying to share his confidence with him directly soul to soul, Loki shed all the smiling red of his gaze into Thor’s eyes.  
“Do you trust me, my sweetest?”  
Thor held onto that red fervently, and with no blinking.  
“You know I do. With my life.”  
“Then…” A smile, a soft kiss, again a smile. His voice, a cuddle. “…don’t ask.”  
And he turned back his head, snuggling up closer to Thor’s chest, if closer than he was already was somehow possible.  
Relieved in feeling his brother fully confident, Loki moved his arm backwards, between their bodies, to reach and clasp Thor’s sex, mildly, and to just hold it in his hand. Amazed and gleeful at the noble vigour of his sweet thunderer, that made it fill his fist, ready at once, in such an amiable, spontaneous,… touching way.  
“Please…” he muffled. “Would you… just…?” He sighed with sunny delight as Thor relished a chuckle between his moistened hair. “I want to fall asleep… with you inside.”  
Thor kissed his nape, compliant, while he smoothly satisfied that sweet request. Loki smiled a dinky moan of fulfilment as his brother shoved in mildly, then closed his eyes, holding Thor’s hands tight on his tummy, and quietly nodded off, huddling all himself up on the warm gentleness of his brother’s manhood.

How long they slept, they couldn’t tell; Loki woke up a while before his brother, with all the lovely weight of Thor’s relaxed body resting on him, cheek on his shoulder, arms clinging him, chest on his chest, legs between legs. _Are you already here, tomorrow?_ , he thought, vaguely annoyed. _No. Stay back, tomorrow, I will not let you come_. He smiled with tenderness, enjoying his sleeping god blowing sweet dreams on him; and still pleasantly dazed after that night, for a bunch of instants he let his eyes go free, cherishing his gorgeous lover. Weightlessly, leisurely. Lovingly. _Just Thor and Loki, lovers, bound together beyond the end of time itself_. He glided on the curves of that glorious back, softly moving while breathing, so shapely sloping to the protruding globes of uru of those buttocks, that were talking perfection, proud and boasting their magnificence in such a natural way that he was moved to tears. _Just Thor and Loki_. He leant his palms on their solid smoothness, staunchly, he felt them trembling instinctively at his touch, he ran his fingertips on the tight furrow that separated and joined them at the same time. _Can you just see your beauty as I see it?_ He shivered with golden zest, for shouting through that beauty he could see, and feel, and almost smell the pureness of Thor’s heart. And he got overwhelmed by the thought that divine fusion between that divine body, that divine heart and soul belonged solely to him and to him only.  
“You told me you sometimes hardly believe… you have the privilege that you can call me yours…” he whispered on Thor snoring softer and softer. “It is the same for me.”   
On his words and on his strokes Thor slowly opened his eyes, humming, raised his head a little, blinked on his face, and smiled.  
“Hey.” His hand reached Loki’s cheek, trapped, amazed. “Your skin… is moonshine again…”   
Loki just nodded, sitting up in the snow, grabbing his cape and wrapping himself in.  
“And I’m feeling cold too, now.” The scent of sex still winding them both was befuddling. “I guess it’s time.” So painful, just to say that. “We have to go.”   
Thor sighed, peering into his eyes, back to their sparkling green.  
“Where, little one?” he asked, fancying the chance for a different answer from the one he knew he would get. _Can’t we just stay?_  
“Back to the real Jotunheim.” _I wish we could, my sweetest._ “As Heimdall said, it’s still only there that we can face that… creature.”  
So they started dressing, silently, the slowest way they could; and only at some point, when they again were able to unstuck their gazes from each other and look around, they noticed: it was still the dead of night. Loki flinched, for that wasn’t on his will. That was self-acting. Like the chaos subverting time outside had become so unmanageable it was starting to infect even that impregnable place.    
A pale misgiving that became huge and ghastly as Thor picked up his belt to wear it.  
And that petrified them both.  
Hanging steady to that belt, as if it never left it.  
Glaring contemptuous.  
There was the dagger.


	9. The last trick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even if time itself stops running straight, what has already been written cannot be unwritten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What happens in this chapter is in my mind since the beginning, that means since almost one year. I have notes on the most crucial scene that go back months. Just to make clear that everything was already stated in my head way before seeing “Thor: The Dark World”.  
> Unnecessary to say that I died several times writing this chapter.  
> Oh, and before anyone may blame me, remember: this is not the last chapter.

_“I guess you now understand what is being asked to you, Loki.”  
“I do. And he does too. But he is sure we can change things. As am I.”  
“You cannot… change things… by throwing a dagger off a cliff, Loki.”  
Silence.  
“This is not likely, Heimdall. I mean, I know the Realms are facing a new Ragnarok, I know this is an issue that cannot be neglected. But I also know the… _everything _that there is now between the two of us goes further beyond that Ragnarok. Beyond any possible spell, or any curse. For it goes further beyond any faculties of conceiving, even mine, or his. Death does not scare me. And I am not a coward. But because of that_ everything _, because of that I know… I can’t just… die.”  
Silence.  
“Speak, Gate-Keeper. You called me here for something, didn’t you? Then speak.”  
“What has already been written cannot be unwritten.”  
A surge of rage, a rush of despair.  
“That’s it? ‘What has been written cannot be unwritten’? Is that your decisive answer to all things?”  
Silence.  
“How… how can you not see what even I can see so clearly, you, the one who claims he can see everything?”  
“I can see all that I need to see, Loki. Now restrain your anger and do what you profess you are capable to do. Look. And see as well.” A long pause, inside what tasted as the farthest place from actual time and space one could conceive. “You must have noticed your occult strength is slowly recovering. That’s because you are godly breed, and even if the spell they casted on you is a most powerful one, yet it cannot defeat your godly nature entirely. Never forget that.”_  
What are you getting at, All-Seer?  
 _“And together with your strength, the very core of this place of yours is regaining life. The stall in time you induced everywhere else is not affecting your inmost secret haven, making its regeneration vital. But this state of things will not last forever.”  
Again, silence. Heavy. Meaningful.  
“I can read on your face you are starting to figure things out rightfully, Loki.” As Heimdall talked on, the fog still clouding his mind started to clear. “The firmness of your change, the Elders trusting my sight in spite of Odin’s frenzy, and our powers allowed us to try and manage the current situation. Not in a solvent way, but still… acceptable to grant every world some hope.” Heimdall’s eyes in his eyes. “A small part of your powers can now be restored. But no-one else but you may decide which part. Look into your regenerating casket, and look thoroughly. Do not consider the present time only. Push your eyes into the future, into your own future. And make your choice… a wise one.”  
Truth. Unexpected, heartening truth. The power of teleporting, and cloning, and changeling, together with the countless abilities his mind used to command until the spell prevented it, all there; all still in fragments, but gradually regaining their consistency. How to choose one? How to choose the right one?  
“Is… is the All-Father apprised of what you… what we are going to arrange?”  
“Odin is just a pawn himself in the big game of fates. Probably a bigger threat than this chaos itself, because of his inability to see; he is so clouded he almost disregards to care about what we are doing. But even he will be forced to see, eventually. For the time being, yet unaware, he is nonetheless at the mercy of your decision, as all the Realms are. And time itself. Together with what your life and Thor’s could be or not after this havoc ends.”  
So hard. So crucial.  
“You must choose, Loki. You already know what, you already did it. Even if there is the chance you’ll never do it, as chaos now stands in time.” A depth, an emphasis never heard before in Heimdall’s voice. “Think of what that dark creature is made of. Think of what it would mean if you wipe it out once and for all.”  
Again, truth. Plain, crystal truth._ “Maybe you did me a favour, instead. I will finally be able to erase that part of me once and for all, when I’ll destroy that creature.” _He was the one who said those words. During his living nightmares, in his Elsewhere. How could he not remember that until that moment?_  
But still, it will be pointless, if to do that I am meant… to die as well.  
 _“Think, Loki. Think of the bigger picture. Everything in that picture has a purpose. The bond between you and Thor. The spell they casted on you. And Odin’s dagger. Even what you created here, ages ago and just following then your twisted arrogance, even and mostly that has a purpose.” Tiles, slowly unscrambling the cloudy jigsaw of the troubled soul of the universe. “Your secret chest is here again. Make the best use of it.”_ Make the best use of it. _“The future is moulding itself right on your moves. Your future. His future.”  
And suddenly, he saw. The one and only possible choice… _“Make the best use of it.” _…and everything else.  
So crystal clear. So logical, so obvious. And so burdensome.  
Still there although, a last, terrible ghost haunting his soul.  
“…and yet, what has already been written…”  
“…cannot be unwritten. Yes, Loki. And that is the reason for you must not… tell him anything.”  
Tears throttling his throat, all of a sudden.  
“I know. Tomorrow, when we’ll get out of here, time will restart and I will be ready. Tomorrow, Heimdall. Because I need this night. I need this night with him.” His voice sounded unyielding. “I need this night to last as long as I will feel it has to.”  
“You are the only one who holds the reins of what is meant to be. And you decide. Go back to him. Just don’t forget your task.”  
The hank of his feelings gradually unravelled into an enlightened, witting, and sorely relinquished resolution.  
“I won’t.”  
They stayed silent, in front of each other, for a long while. Or for a bunch of seconds. Either way, both burdened with the awareness that the worlds, thereafter, would not have carried the same look as before.  
Only an instant before living that little realm of flimsiness, in Loki’s eyes, the sparkle of a riddle he just forget to think about till then.  
“Heimdall. I saw… words… wavering on that blade. Words that I could not read.”  
Silence.  
“Heimdall.”  
“Those words are not meant for you, Loki.”_

On Asgard, the Bifrost creaked under the feral rush of the clones of the beast, following the call of their leader to the core of Odin’s mansion, with such a boisterous fury that Heimdall could not even think to try to stop them.   
_Gathering.  
In greedy frenzy.  
All his other selves, blood-starved, gathering. And coming.  
The light was close, pulsating, and crying out for his seething hunger.  
He hurled himself on the barrier still separating him, he roared, his claws ploughed through the hindrance, again, and again, and again._  
There, in the secret alcove where the Casket of Ancient Winters was glimmering more and more turbulent, the All-Father struggled to knock up the last rampart, driven by his blind hatred and his deranged anger, growling his random orders to his warriors, and guards, and sorcerers, and everyone still alive inside the crumbling palace. Ruling their certain death. He could hear the rabid monster scraping the last portal dividing it from its prey, between the massive quakes shaking the whole edifice; he shouted in rage, stumbling on his own feet and his own mind, as he realized that not even Gungnir was of any help.  
 _He dealt the last blow with his enormous paws, and at that same instant his brothers came and joined him.  
Juicy, that wild, unleashed Aesir anger he caught rumbling behind the crashing door.  
So deliciously mixed with that Aesir extreme hate.  
Spurring. Irresistible.  
He drooled, gnashing his fangs.  
The ancient Aesir heart oozing that flavoursome muddle would have been the last to be swallowed._

The eternal night that seemed to have devoured Jotunheim was lightened only by the frosty rain, falling unremitting and dense as far as the eye could see. They walked, and walked, silently, side by side, their hands grazing each other, so naturally and proudly no-one could have thought that was a sign of weakness in their hearts; Loki following his renewed ability to see beyond things and leading his brother after him, Thor keeping his eyes fixed on him and trying not to feel the enormous weight of the dagger hanging from his belt.  
There was no trace of the giants, almost no trace of life, apart from the clear feeling trembling in both their souls of somehow being followed by _presences_ from an invisible, intangible in-between; that kept both of them heads-up and ready to hit as soon as any menace came manifest.  
“They are around here, but they don’t show,” Loki whispered when they came to the border of a vast valley.  
Thor nodded.  
“I can smell them,” he answered, moving his look around with nebulous concern. “What are they waiting for? And what are we going to do?”  
Loki stopped at the start of a path that vanished far away into the night, down along the vale, made almost unseen by the snow. He blinked, pushing his sight afar towards the horizon.  
“They are just… waiting.” There was a veil of pensiveness in his voice, Thor could feel it clearly, like Loki was sorely forcing himself not to tell his brother the entire truth, whereas he’d wanted to. How odd, Loki  thought. How agreeably odd that now he found so hard and painful to lie to Thor on something. “And we are going to pre-empt them.”  
The look on his face was deeply intense, and slightly worried, but strongly confident at the same time. Like he could see everything happening in the meanwhile outside Jotunheim, everywhere, now having the boldness he could control it.  
“My… _other self_ is very close to its prey.”  
And that wasn’t a lie.  
He took a deep breath as he grabbed Thor’s hand and clinched it, smiling on the fretting look on his brother’s face.  
“But now I know where it intends to take it.” He plunged his eyes deep into his brother’s, as he spoke with restrained uneasiness. “Laufey’s old palace.”  
He pointed his index to the depth of the night in front of them.  
“It’s on the other side of Jotunheim. And we have not much time left.”  
There, Thor put his arm around his waist and clung him to himself, tightly. So passionately and with such an eager ardour, eyes in his eyes, breathing his breath, that Loki gasped in relish and they both had to use violence over themselves to keep their mouths from cleaving to each other.  
“Cling onto me, little one,” Thor said on Loki’s lips, rising his hammer up to the dark sky. “Mjolnir will take us there.”  
Without looking away from his eyes, Loki girdled his brother’s torso with all the strength his love could give him, and committed himself to his sweet god lifting him in his clasp as easily as if it was his soul, and not his body, that he was carrying; and in a blast of light they flew off together towards the clouds.

_Fear.  
Blended with fury, and arrogance, and overconfidence.  
But fear was the prevailing emotion he caught when he finally jumped in, together with his growling herd.  
All those mighty Aesirs frozen in fear.  
And the light.  
The light was overpowering everything else. Even the tasty smell of that old, askew god whose only eye was stuck looking at him. That living incarnation of bloated rage, hatred and… fear that still stood between him and the light.  
He didn’t understand all that was nothing else but growing madness, he didn’t know how madness tasted, he never came across madness before. But it smelled toothsome.  
He snarled, stepping towards him._

Monstrously high, the half-crumpled walls of which once must have been the most titanic mansion in the Nine Realms.  
Creepy.  
In the plumbean, unnatural dim that covered the whole land, nonetheless the ruins stood sinister and almost talking, towering them both as their feet touched the soil in front of the remains of the entrance.  
Through the collapsed roof the snow kept falling, for centuries, subsuming walls, and broken columns, and arcades into the surrounding landscape, making them part of it and still letting them howl their greatness in history along with the unceasing wind lashing that Realm. The hugeness of the place, murmuring subtly the ancient might of its gigantic builders, let them both out of speech; moreover, Loki was sure the Jotuns were about to take their last stand against them.  
That side of his existence never belonged to him truly, not in the terms of being part of that Realm, and of that race and culture. Nevertheless, walking so deeply into the very core of his real father’s dominion, and into a spectrum of memories he never actually lived, unleashed a jumble of conflicting sensations inside his soul.  
Thor caught that trouble in his blinking gaze, he grabbed his nape and whispered on his panting.  
“You alright, little one?”  
Loki winced at his touch, he smiled, shrugging the tension off at once.  
“Yes… yes. Just… random feelings. Let’s move.” He looked around with prudence, then motioned to his brother. “This way.”  
He could distinctly feel, among the heavy presence of the giants looming still invisible over their heads, a growing quiver trying to trespass the void between the Realms and reach the heart of Jotunheim, where he perfectly knew the barrier separating the worlds was thinner and more easily breakable. He could distinctly feel his _other self_ being on the threshold of the passageway the Jotuns were managing to open. When a tremor shook the ruins together with a flare of blue light, even if still far and clouded, he realized they had no more time left.  
“We must hurry!”, he whispered, turning to Thor’s side. “It’s in the throne room that they’re trying to break in.”  
He led his brother through what was left of the huge corridors, both running under the snow that fell thicker and thicker, and avoiding the debris crumpling from the walls around at every ground’s quake. As they were a few meters from the entrance of Laufey’s throne room, Loki suddenly grabbed Thor’s arm and tugged him behind the remains of a column.   
“Wait.”  
Mjolnir’s hilt was burning in Thor’s clasp, as burning was his eagerness for fight, for finally having his revenge, for putting and end to that mayhem. They were panting heavily, eyes stuck into each other’s, when all of a sudden, from the dense fog surrounding the enormous throne carved directly into the rocks, a dozen giants showed up. Behind the sullen chair, half visible, from a rift in the stone wall a trembling light was glaring, along with the tremors that became more and more recurring.  
Loki strengthened his fingers around his spear, he grasped Thor’s hand and breathed on his mouth, without looking away from his eyes not even for a second.  
“We must split up,” he said, Thor frowned, Loki toughened his grip on his hand, determined, confident. “You keep them busy, while I try and close the passageway.”  
Thor shook his head, worried, wound-up.  
“This is not wise.”  
The resolution in Loki’s gaze glimmered with zeal.   
“Maybe it is not.” His hand on Thor’s cheek. “But there is no other option, my sweetest.”  
Thor knew he was right, and he returned that stroke, his soul nevertheless still shaded with harsh concern. Because the boundless depth their mutual bond had reached by then let him sharply understand Loki had something else in mind. What, he couldn’t tell, however. And that, under the haughty look that winded up his figure, was scaring him to death.  
“Take care of yourself, little one.”  
A smile on Loki’s lips, a fleeting kiss, a glance of empathy.  
“And you as well.”  
Thor watched his brother disappear behind the fallen arcades, heart in his throat, and at the same time the Jotuns started turning towards his still hidden position, clearly detecting his presence and Loki sneaking away into the dim. With no more hesitance, he focused on their growing fury, he jumped out right in the middle of them, pointing his hammer above, with a mad roar, he called the thunder. It cracked down implacable, as implacable was Thor’s wrath when thereon, before any of the giants could move a step against him, he smashed Mjolnir on the ground, making it splinter in a huge wave of fractures that caught the Jotuns unprepared and mowed most of them down. After that, he just let his furore rampage, blindly and relentless.  
When Loki reached the cleft, it was way larger already, and the outburst of light blinding; he heard the gurgle through the swarming tide and finally he saw it, for the first time there in the real world. Monstrous, and rabid, and unrelenting, growling with sightless ferocity while clamping the Casket in his drooling jaws. When his gaze intersected the creature’s, Loki just froze, breathless, horrified. It was just an instant, but it lasted a millennium: through those deadpan, ruthless eyes he felt, he saw, he smelled the living and soulless evil that… _thing_ was made of. And that was _part of him. “Think of what it would mean if you wipe it out once and for all.”_ Only the strength that gave him the highest purpose he ever had in his life, only the utmost significance of accomplishing his task, prevented him from being demolished by the lethal loathing of that vision and raise his spear, screaming wildly, against that doomed embodiment of his forgotten self.  
On the opposite side of the throne room, amongst the turbulence of the ongoing fight, Thor was almost enjoying his giants carnage; between his leaping, running, falling and raising again to dodge the frozen blows of the giants, never being hit and always hitting his targets in return, he glanced around from side to side, in hopes to see Loki reappearing at any moment. Mjolnir was swinging up and down, striking the Jotuns mercilessly as they just tried to get closer, faithfully back every time in the mighty fist of its master. Who grew more and more worried, because his little brother wasn’t coming back yet.  
“Loki!”, he shouted at last, louder than the racket of the fight. “Loki, are you alright?!”  
No answer came, and even if it did it would have been overpowered by the rumble of the stone wall behind the throne being crushed down. From the huge cloud of dust and stones, before Thor’s stunned eyes, howling, and growling, and shaking its enormous head rabidly, the beast jumped out. On Thor’s gasp of despair, _Why is it here? Loki, where are you?_ , on his harrowing scream, “Loki! Answer me, Loki!!!”, it swooped on the giants on its way and slaughtered them randomly, one after another until it butchered them all, aiming to him and to him only. He raised Mjolnir with a devastating roar, the creature stroke his arm violently with its claws, that ripped his flesh and made the hammer fly meters away, Thor couldn’t think, or focus, or call Mjolnir back in time, the creature was already on him, his hand by instinct ran to reach his flank.  
And grabbed the dagger.  
Too late he saw that glimpse in the eyes of the beast, that glimpse that came together with its furious leap over him. That glimpse he caught just at the very instant when, with all the strength he carried in his arms, he jabbed the dagger deep into the furry chest. That glimpse that, in a rush, made him understand everything, and his soul be torn asunder, and his whole mind implode.  
The dreadful, endless “No!!!” he rent the skies with, making everything around stop in cosmic anguish, went along with the blade, unstoppable by then for the impetuosity charging the blow he gave, and plunging in its whole length right into the heart of what, at once, was not a monster anymore.  
“No…”  
At once, it was just… Loki.  
Together with the shock blew rage, _That you had in mind from the start, didn’t you?!_ , and blew despair, and fear, and a thousand swords carved his heart in pieces. _You bastard, why?! Why you made me do this, why?!_  
Gasps, quivers, tears, and screams, and throes shaking his whole body, cutting his breath, his voice, his ability to reason. _Why?!_  
“…no…”  
A clump of stone wrung his throat out.  
Just Loki, his Loki, frail and defenceless in his sudden nakedness, pale, broken, bleeding… _It’s just a trick, it’s a trick, a wicked trick, a trick_. Stabbed to death. By his own hand. As stated. The storm of pangs devastating Thor’s soul killed in him any survived lucidity. Stunned, mauled, enraged. Desperate. His unblemished Loki, choking a racking moan of pain, grabbing Thor’s arms while falling, those arms that clasped him desperately and almost blindly, to keep him close, to keep him safe. From the cold of the snow, from darkness. From death. _No. This is a nightmare. A nightmare. I didn’t stab you, and you are not going to die_. They both bent to the ground, and in the lair of those arms Loki coughed blood, weakened already as though at any wheeze he took he blew life out, never going to retrieve it. Thor could do nothing else but hold him, panicked, and frantically sustain his head to stroke his forehead, and cheeks, and lips, and neck. Both mute, both searching ravingly in each other’s eyes something they didn’t have the heart to name. As Loki started shivering, slightly, uncontrollably, Thor wrapped him into his cape, by instinct, unable to look at the terrible wound shouting from his chest, and nestled him to his bosom, hallucinated. He kept his head up, close to his face, to look into his eyes and be sure the light sparkling in them was not slipping away. His mind gone blank.  
“…I… closed it… Th-Thor… I…”  
Words came out together with blood from Loki’s mouth, like they were pushed out from Hel itself, and Thor spitted his racking sobs right on his face.  
They couldn’t see, after it had been driven back on Asgard as the rift closed, the real beast vanishing together with its clones, at the same very instant the dagger broke into Loki’s chest. They couldn’t see the Casket falling, safe at last, from the disappearing jaws right at the feet of Odin. They couldn’t see the twisted look on the All-Father’s face, as he started to realize the kind of inference that had to be hidden behind that last challenge. As they couldn’t see the Realms being pulled back to their preceding state and Yggdrasil regaining its life-force, nor time restarting to run straight, nor the night all around finally clearing up into an unhoped-for dawn.  
All they could see was despair flooding each other’s gaze.  
Loki grabbed Thor’s hair, gasping, his mouth wide opened on the wrenching twinge that pierced his body. His staggered eyes waffled on the dagger’s hilt springing up from his chest like a poisoned sprout, then locked again into his brother’s, looking for forgiveness, and for a reason, and for a blink of hope. How hard, to try and speak swallowing his own blood together with Thor’s tears, burning beads of prostration dropping on the ice of his cheeks. How excruciating, the feeling of ebbing away so swiftly, knowing into his bones he wouldn’t have time enough to tell him everything.   
“…I could… choose… part of my powers…” His mouth trembled in anguish, because far more than the cutting pain he could not bear the devastated look on his sweet god’s face. “…to be restored…” The choked sobs tearing that mighty, beloved body apart. “…changeling… I chose… ch-changeling…”  
Shaking his head in confusion, Thor couldn’t tame the havoc in his soul and he just kept on skimming his face, incredulous, in tears. He could just sigh out a “…why?” so broken, so agonizing that it stabbed Loki once more, more deeply than the blade stuck in his heart.  
“…now… everything has been… fixed…” Each single breath was a torment, but still he found enough strength to veil his brother’s cheek with his faltering hand. “…I didn’t mean… to trick you…” And to make that the most tender stroke ever. “…f-forgive me… it was… the only way…” A tremendous endeavour to rise his head closer to Thor’s, to drown in his eyes and flood them with his plea.  “…promise me… please… promise me you won’t… destroy yourself… for this…”  
 _…and please, my sweetest, give me just one more kiss, just one, one more again, before it is too late, for I want to blow off knowing that you don’t hate me._  
An inch from his blood-filled mouth, Thor smelled his utmost craving right in his fading breath. He kissed his lips with everlasting care, feeling them trembling first, then trying to stay into that kiss as long as possible to whisper to his soul all his devotion; then his tongue getting colder, and slowly stiffening, as the blood clumping in his throat forced him to cough and sorely get unstuck to manage to breathe on. Tenuously, Loki kept his blearing eyes dunked in his brother’s, his lips striving a pale, sore smile grazing Thor’s mouth.  
Feeling the dagger’s power. Yielding to it, unwittingly.  
That blade. How tragically amazing was that blade, forged beyond any doubt by virtue of the finest sorcery. Pulsating into his chest as if it was alive, a hellish parasite devouring his flesh, not only it was sucking his life away; that blade was ingesting even his essence. His emotions, his memories. His soul.   
Thor’s grasp on his body became stronger, for he clearly saw him withering away; he just stared at his face, impotent, depleted, when Loki, in a last strain of despair, rasped a few more words out.  
“…my… s-sweetest…” His fingers still tangled into Thor’s hair, he needed so much to tell him more, not to let him get lost in the doom of self-damnation. “…you have… to…” Not to make his own death, and all that grief, worthless. “…y-you…” But his voice just blew out, his mind went blurry, his breath became so slight and short it turned almost impalpable. And all he was still able to do was letting two little tears well up in his eyes, that he helplessly tried to maintain opened to keep talking to Thor at least with them, but that were whilst closing relentlessly. There, at once, in the oncoming blackness, sparkled the glimmering echo of a thought that veiled his bleeding soul with a wispy, warm hem of eternity. For a long time in his past life he strongly believed he would have died alone, hated, misbegotten; whereas, he was about to fall asleep within the embrace of the only one who always cared about him, the only one he always cared about. The only one who would have died for him, the only one he would have died for. The only one he would have granted unconditionally the right of life and death on his own self. _“…if it is written that to end this I have to die, I can’t think of a sweeter way than by your hand.”_ Just a blink, just an instant before the darkness sealed upon him, but yet enough. To make him feel alright. And in the last flicker of consciousness he had left, he prayed that his sweet god could seize that feeling.  
But all that Thor could feel was him fleeing slowly, and he gasped, he pressed his cheek on Loki’s, he thought he called his name; he almost didn’t discern he just threw up new tears.  
“No”, was the only word his throat could sough, “…no”, on the crushing rage that self-blame unleashed in him, “…no…”, on the golden mosaic of their future grinding into a faint heap of nothingness. Of void. Of non-existence. Bent on his little brother’s mouth he could still catch the shadow of a breath, fading, dimming, dying. He grazed the smoothness of his neck just to perceive his pulse was imperceptible, and getting even feebler. Along with the throbbing strokes his hands kept fondling him with, his foggy gaze caressed once again the paleness of his skin and stopped, shattered, on the hilt of that vessel of perdition that so callously profaned its flawless pureness. Blue iced veins were spreading from the wound like a lethal infection on the silk of that chest, so blemishing, so cruelly that Thor just had to grab that hilt and drew the dagger out, carefully rabid; an involuntary, slight flinch shook Loki’s body, as the blade was ripped out; Thor tossed it in the snow, repelled, without turning his eyes away from Loki’s face.  
He strengthened his clasp around him, breathing heavily right on his mouth, now still, half-open, frozen into the hint of a smile. His chest was not moving anymore, his lids were clamped, even the blood stopped pouring from his lips. And from Thor’s hair Loki’s hand loosened its grip, then it fell lifeless on Thor’s shoulder, it slipped softly along his arm and then down on the snow.  
A gasp blocked Thor’s breath, he squeezed that hand in his, he sustained him, he felt in him the terrible weight of ultimate abandon.   
Stillness.  
Silence.  
Cosmic stillness petrified in cosmic silence.  
Broken in stops and starts by his sobs only.  
He shook his little one, hesitant, gentle.   
“Loki. Loki… Loki, please. Loki.” Saying his name at last, again and again, and hear how sweet it sounded, all sodden in tears, was like having the power of dragging him back to life. “Loki, talk to me. Loki.” He shook him again, disoriented, paralyzed. And again, lightly. Uselessly. “I know it’s a trick, Loki. Loki… just… stop it.” His heart was hurting so much from his strangled throes that he was sure it was about to explode and tear his chest apart. “Don’t play on me. Loki. Please. Please… please.”  
 _“I look into your eyes and I see life, little one.”_  
He cradled his lifeless brother in his arms, yet certain he could still feel his cuddle and his voice calling him awake; on the last _please_ of a thousand he repeated, emptied, mechanically, his mouth still moved, but no more sound came out.  
He persisted holding his head up, compulsively, but it kept falling backwards, heavy, inert; he lifted his arm, listless, inanimate, he took his hand to his cheek to warm it up, but it stayed frozen, his fingers rigid, still; he nestled him in a convulsive grip to his chest, he kissed him everywhere, he grasped his hair, he grazed his legs, he stroked his back, and only when he had no more tears left to cry he realized his little one was not reacting any longer.   
_“… The only kind of life I can conceive to keep calling mine_ life _as well.”_  
Holding his lapsed head tight on his bosom, again he lulled him tenderly, sheeting him with his body.  
His soul drained.  
Lost, wasted, annihilated.   
_Terrified_.  
Nothing, ever, in his whole life, nothing had the power to make him feel so terrified.  
And now he was.  
Terrified. And dried in front of the bottomless abyss of bleakness his own hand, his own cursed, blinded hand unroofed.  
 _Everything in the Nine Realms is worthless living for, except you_.  
In the ruinous emptiness now screaming against him, where only the coldness of his little one’s body stuck to his own, where only his terrified denial existed, his petty crave for vengeance, his worthless might, even his godhood were carrying no more meaning.  
 _I won’t let you go_.  
He coiled his Loki even tighter in his arms, he felt him getting colder, colder, and it was not the ravishing, burning cold his fingers grazed in ecstasy just a few hours earlier. It was an ultimate cold, it was the cold of absence, of utter loss. It was the cold of death.  
Death.  
End.  
Of everything.  
Everything _theirs_.  
By his own hand. His hand. Something the awareness of he simply could not suffer. Nor live on with. He nuzzled himself on him, down in the snow, driving Loki’s dead arms around his waist, so that his little one could embrace him again, even in death. He closed his eyes on Loki’s frozen forehead, whispering the shadow of a smile from another dimension, and rested, there, in the snow, with him.  
 _I won’t let you go alone_.  
There, in the snow, with him.  
He’d warmed his little one up with his body, until his body had no more warmth to share.  
He’d become ice with him, forever, so that no-one could violate the sacred temple of their undying love.  
He’d let his own soul be consumed in blame, until his own heartbeat faded into silence.  
There, in the snow, with him.  
There, in the snow, with him, he’d waited for death, quietly.  
Even if it had taken a thousand years for death to come.


	10. Dawn (Epilogue)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end of something is never simply an end. The end of something is always the beginning of something else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here ends the first arc of my story. But the whole story doesn’t, as I’m sure you’ll understand reading this epilogue. I’m already working on the first chapter of the second arc, and I really don’t know if I’ll ever let them go. From my heart and mind, I mean.
> 
> The poem I quote in this chapter is by Mary Elizabeth Frye.

_“We were raised as brothers, but actually we are not. We were friends, and we were enemies. We almost lost each other. Until that night. When we found each other again. And became one.”_

Cheerful, the tepid breeze brushing their hair as they spurred their horses at full gallop along the river’s bank. Both laughing blithely in the sunny morning, pursuing each other for fun and chasing each other’s gaze to exchange glances of desire.  
How freeing, to ride aimlessly and till their horses were worn-out just for the pleasure of doing that together and stop on the farthest oxbow, where the river formed a large, transparent pool, and little cascades.  
How wondrously childish, after throwing their clothes randomly on the green, to dive naked into the water and play, just that, laughing, for ages.  
How sweet to let that play turn into a more and more intense twine of touches, and then make love, weightlessly, lulled by the tiny waves. Then walk out from the water hand in hand, smiling, lapse onto the grass and rest, all wet, Thor’s cheek on Loki’s tummy, soaking life up through his skin.  
“I wish I had enough power on words” Loki whispered “to create new ones expressly to tell you how much I love you.”  
“You don’t need words for that, little one.”  
Then, suddenly, it was twilight.  
“I remember a poem,” Loki murmured.  
And it was the wide, golden terrace of their private room in Asgard where now they were sitting one-on-one, unseen and still undressed, Loki holding one of his finest daggers in his hand.  
“Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there; I do not sleep.”  
Like he was officiating a sacred rite, his eyes locked into Thor’s, he divided a long lock from his own hair, he smoothed it down, he delicately cut it at the hairline, tenderly smiling at his brother’s bafflement. After that, he started plaiting that lock into Thor’s hair so that the braid could hang up along his brother’s cheek.  
“Why are you doing that?”, Thor asked softly, still puzzled.  
“Because you must always remember I’m part of you.” He grazed that braid when he finished, he smiled at the black wisp entwined in gold, smiling he kissed Thor’s cheek. He looked so wise in his outshining beauty. “Even when I’ll be gone.”  
Thereafter, Loki put the dagger’s hilt on Thor’s palm, still smiling sweetly, and closed his brother’s fingers on it.  
And then again, at once, it was Hel.  
A darkened, blurry vision, anyway Thor felt it.  
As he felt Loki. Or better still, as he felt what… was left… of Loki.  
In Hel.  
Fragments of a speech came to his ears, it was Loki’s voice, and then his own.  
 _“You’re looking at me… as if I were more precious than anything else in your life…”  
“You are.”_  
Just shadows, in the dark of that unfamiliar perception of Hel. _I must be dead as well, thanks gods_ , he though. _I will be with you again_.  
Bleakness. Nothing was really visible all around, not even an adumbration of his Loki, whom he still heard speaking so obscure, from the mistiness, from nowhere.  
 _“…how are we… related?”_  
The echo of himself answering him.  
 _“We were raised as brothers, but actually we are not. We were friends, and we were enemies. We almost lost each other. Until that night. When we found each other again. And became one.”_  
At once, their room again, again their terrace, the two of them still sitting face to face, Loki still smiling confident into his eyes. And the night falling on him, darker and darker.  
“You must always remember I’m part of you.”  
The night, swamping Loki alone. Making him become slivers of the whole blackness, slowly.   
_Even when I’ll be gone.  
Even when I’ll be gone.  
Even when I’ll be gone._

…and with a start, roughly, he came awaken.  
Alive.  
He could have slept an hour, he could have slept a century. Not that he cared, since he was not dead already.  
Was that a dream?  
Freezing, under the snowy mantle that almost covered him by then, his bowels aching, his head bewildered, his muscles cramped, his throat hoarse and burning. An indistinct bubble of murkiness preventing him from regaining an even slightest sense of reality.  
A dream…  
…and the real world. As his eyes could be forced to focus again, they fell on Loki, abandoned in the snow alongside him, still inert, still frigid.  
Still dead.  
A broken sigh. He sorely bent on him to skim his iced face and carefully enrobe in the dusky red of his cape the few parts of his body left uncovered. The rime whitening his hair, his eyebrows, his lashes, even his blood encrusted on his cheeks, hour after hour had imprinted on him the irredeemable hopelessness of his condition. Thor absently adjusted his cloak’s strips around his neck, thoroughly, unable to give form to any thought in his severed mind. Or any emotion in his shattered soul.  
Outside of rage.  
 _You spurn me, death?_ A grievous, weary rage. _You think you can mock me because I’m born a god?_  
He frantically groped around until he found the dagger, he grasped it in his fist, he looked back at his brother, he panted heavily.  
“If it killed you, my treasured…” _You put it in my hands, in that dream, it’s all so cloudy, but I am sure of that._ “…it can kill me as well.”  
He bowed his head on it, disgusted by those loathsome moments that fates compelled him to live on, he clamped the hilt with both his hands, he turned it to his stomach… and there he saw the words.  
He saw the words.  
Clear, fixed, almost glaring. Carved on that blade still stained with Loki’s blood, plain and astonishing.  
The words.  
His heart jumped in his chest.  
 _ **“You have to let me go to have me back, my sweetest.”**_  
How? How was that possible?  
He glanced at Loki, his soul shaken by the growing glimmer of the hope he would have seen him waking up briskly.  
“…L-Loki…”  
But he did not.  
 _ **“You have to let me go to have me back, my sweetest.”**_  
What magic was that, then? And… was it even magic, or was he just delirious?  
Thor read those words again, _**“You have to let me go…”**_ , and he repeated them endlessly in his mind, _**“…to have me back…”**_ , he grazed the blade to feel them _real_ under his fingertips, _**“…my sweetest.”**_ , to be undoubtedly sure he was not dreaming on.  
“You are not, prince Thor.”  
Only at that point, taken aback, Thor turned himself abruptly towards the voice and realized Heimdall was there, standing a few meters further, staring at them, impassive. Maybe since ever.  
“And he is not going to wake up,” Heimdall went on, on his bewildered silence. “Not for the time being.” His gaze burdening Thor was a boulder of woe, while he – still on his knees nearby his little one and not showing a sign of willing to stand up – looked back at the dagger in his hand. “Yes, Thor. You have to let him go to have him back.”  
Heimdall fell silent on him lifting his brother’s back from the snow and tucking his cape in again on his dead body, dotingly, like he was wrapping him in a blanket interwoven with the bleeding yarns of his soul. _Don’t you dare to ask me to leave him alone, Gate-Keeper._ Grasping the dagger in one hand, with the other he held Loki tight against his chest.   
“Take your best care of that dagger, Thor. It carries the echo of his soul.” Heimdall slightly nodded at Thor staring at that blade with a sudden, confused rush of awareness. “He left those words for you, taking advantage of the chaos in time, and of the unique making of that weapon. Odin did not think of that, when he ordered it forged from his inmost essence.”  
Thor was just listening, numbly, trying to give a sense to that river of unforeseen words came to overwhelm him with a new storm of vibes.  
 _“It carries the echo of his soul.”_  
“Your brother has always been aware of everything; but at the same time he wasn’t, because only in his Elsewhere he could be. And because of the spell, not even there completely consciously. Because of the spell, he could not remember. Not till the very last moments of his life.”  
The wind grew more lashing, almost trying to push Thor to wipe out the turmoil still seething in his mind. _Talk on, All-Seer_ , he thought, his head still bowed on Loki’s iced hair, his cheek still rubbing his brow, almost unconsciously, _and I will listen. But I don’t have heart enough to gratify you with an answer._  
“Soon, you’ll understand your task has just begun. Even if the mayhem has been stopped, Odin has lost the light. When I finally could enter the Casket Room, I found him crumpled. Cursing at Loki, cursing at you, even though he thought you dead, cursing at his whole house and his descent, cursing at his own self. And there I forced him to see. To see that it was Loki who sacrificed his life to save us all, and him as well. That it was him who arranged all things to break the spell. I forced Odin to see how worthy Loki was, in spite of his blind hatred, how worthy you both were, in spite of his misjudgement. And in front of the boundlessness of his blame, the All-Father yielded to derangement. I left him locked into his darkest room, facing the endless chasm of his remorse, screaming his madness out, blinded, and blasted.”  
So weird, how that feeling came not unexpected. Thor discovered himself almost _relieved_ hearing of Odin’s madness. But that didn’t deserve any other room among his thoughts.  
He just kept his eyes stuck on the frozen chrysalis of his love.  
 _“It carries the echo of his soul.”_  
That was the only crucial thing he could hang on to.  
 _“It carries the echo of his soul.”_  
His mind fixed to recover the dream he lived that night. He felt Heimdall’s steps moving towards him with no need to turn his head.  
“Stand on your feet, Thunderer, and be the god you are demanded to be. For the Nine Realms, that are still waiting. For Asgard, that is now contemplating a vacant throne.” Vaguely, his iced eyes glanced at Loki. “And for him, who needs you now more than he ever did.”  
Grievously, Thor shook his head, still unable to look beyond the deadly stillness petrifying Loki’s countenance. _What could I ever do for him, All-Seer? The one that touched him is not an usual death._  
“Take him wherever you believe your home is,” Heimdall just stated “and grant him a worthy passage to the Afterlife. You mourn him dead, now, and this is fair, because he is.” His voice grew imposing. “But you should know, prince Thor, and you must not forget: the end of something is never simply an end. The end of something is always the beginning of something else.” He calibrated his last words to make them hit Thor’s soul like a sword of light. “And what I see beginning begins now. Here. Today.”  
Thor frowned, as that light illumined his misty mind.  
Hel.  
That was why he saw Hel in that dream. Why he heard Loki, and himself, talking… in Hel. Hel, waiting for him as well. But not to welcome him walking beyond his last boundary. _“Soon, you’ll understand your task has just begun.”_ And the whole dream was there, all of a sudden, like a solved jigsaw shouting out of his memories. His breath hastened, his heart pulsed in his throat, as the corner of his eye finally noticed. It was not there yesterday. Nor ever, before that very moment.  
 _“You must always remember I’m part of you.”_  
Sliding softly from his own head along his cheek, a braid. A braid weaving a long, silky black strand together with the blond of his own hair. He held it on his fingers, staring at it, he grazed it almost devoutly, incredulous, while startling tears surged in his eyes. Because, along with that last prodigious finding, he remembered also the poem that Loki whispered to him while he braided his hair in his dream.

_Do not stand at my grave and weep,  
I am not there; I do not sleep.  
I am a thousand winds that blow,  
I am the diamond glints on snow,  
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,  
I am the gentle autumn rain.  
When you awaken in the morning’s hush  
I am the swift uplifting rush  
Of quiet birds in circled flight.  
I am the soft stars that shine at night.  
Do not stand at my grave and cry,  
I am not here; I did not die._

He shook dismay off his soul and body, securing the dagger to his belt, and shivered as he felt it so unexpectedly lightweight. Of course it was, he though a second after. It was carrying the echo of his little one’s soul. The echo of his soul. And now, Thor knew what he was meant to do. An arm under his brother’s thighs, the other around his waist, endlessly careful, he picked his lifeless Loki up, convulsively gripping him through the rough red of his cape.  
And stood undaunted in the frozen wind. 

_“The end of something is always the beginning of something else.”_

He looked up to the sky, his heart warming up at the perception of what laid ahead of him.  
After what he had named as the most eternal night in his existence, he filled his eyes with the gleam overpowering the land, that he could not catch until then, but that was growing brighter and brighter over the ruins around since the instant Loki had fallen stabbed in his arms, a life before.  
He felt the whole universe warming up in accord and knew that he was ready.  
He looked up to the sky.  
And saw the dawn.


End file.
